


I Am Not What You Think

by Alierana



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!, Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drabbles, Female Senju Tobirama, Female Skull (Katekyou Hitman Reborn!), Gen, I Don't Know Where This Is Going, I don't know what though, I don't know why I wrote this, I will be altering the end of Naruto, I will keep some, There is cursing, Tobirama is Skull, Tsuna is So Done, Why Did I Write This?, chapters aren't in order, mostly from the Varia, please be normal, these chapters are short, will take suggestions - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-07-27 04:57:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 43
Words: 24,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16211876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alierana/pseuds/Alierana
Summary: Okay, so I wrote each chapter on lunch breaks and such so I don't know how long I will follow the same story thread and don't know what I will do when the thread changes.Tobirama lives his first life like you remember (or maybe I will change things later)(small things?) except he is a she, not that anyone knows that. When she dies you would think that would be it, but it's not, she is reborn in a world that she doesn't understand (until she does) and decides this time maybe she would try her brother's way of dealing with things. That mostly works (until it doesn't).I suck at summaries and if you read this and think of a better one, or a better title, let me know.(Also, I have not thought about pairings at all but I might add one, I think I want to, so just add a comment with your vote if you have one. Main pairings, side pairing, or just a general 'I would like to see'. I don't know if I will use/do all of them, but I might.)





	1. Tobirama 1

Tobirama Senju had lived every day of her life in the shadows and behind layers of masks. What she loved and what she cared for, those soft parts of her, had been hidden away in order to keep it safe. Hashirama was not like her. He was bright and happy and larger than life to her from the very beginning. He had always been what she loved most in the world.

Tobirama loved Hashirama, and she would do anything to keep him safe and happy despite how he would say that was the job of the older sibling. She had been in his shadow from the moment she was born, and was looked down upon by her father because of it. He was both disappointed that she was not stronger than she was, that she was not equal to her brother, and yet he never expected anything better of her. She was a girl and so a disappointment after all.

She didn't mind though; she didn't care what her father thought of her. Her one and only loyalty was to her brother.


	2. Tobirama 2

Tobirama Senju had been born a girl.

Her father might not have minded having a child to trade away for an alliance, but a number of things prevented that from happening. First, she was considered to be deformed by her father because of her coloring. To the children and wary adults in the clan, she was considered to be a ghost at first, some kind of spirit shoved into the body of a child, but as she grew and they were met with her cold attitude and brilliant mind they called her a demon most often. Second, since before she could walk she had been able to sense everyone in her ever-growing range. She was a sensor born with an ability most spent their entire lives trying to gain. Third, and most important, was that she was good at fighting, good at war, and good at killing. She was second to only her brother in fighting ability and yet she was the one to cause the most fear when she stepped onto a field of battle.

Tobirama Senju had been commanded to be a boy.

Her father noted those things that made her more useful to the clan as a weapon rather than a bride and allowed her to stay. She did what she had to in order to stay as close as she could to her brother, who may not need her help physically but had to be protected emotionally. Hashirama was too kind and gentle and caring, and those flaws were not ones that Tobirama could be accused of.


	3. Tobirama 3

Hashirama spent so much of his life disappointed with Tobirama, but though she hated it she knew that there was nothing she could do about it. Having him be disappointed with her but safe, having the ability to stay by his side, meant that she was willing to accept that she might not ever be his favorite person. Still, he seemed to love her more before their father had sent her to spy on him, before she gave away his secret meetings with the Uchiha boy that he was friends with.

She loved her brother but sometimes she thought him too naive for the world that they lived in. Hashirama disliked her obedience to their father, but he never seemed to think about why it was she would obey him as she did, especially when her brother should have known that her loyalty lie with him and him alone. If she fell from their father's favor, if he deemed her to be of no more use to him, he would find somewhere to send her. He would see her sent off with a team, if not alone, on a mission, a suicide mission, to pit her against powerful enemies of the Senju until she finally fell in battle. Or, worse, he would find someone for her to marry, someone for her to be subservient to. She would either be a spy for the Senju, a sleeper agent, or a way to control another family and bring them into the fold.

Hashirama was naive, too naive to see all the potential places on the board she might be placed and be for use to the clan head. (He didn't want to be her father and she only acknowledged him as such because he was the connection between Hashirama and her. That connection was the best, and only, gift he had ever given her.) At this point, she wouldn't be surprised if her brother had forgotten that she was a girl at all. It had been so long ago that she was commanded to hide away her true self and she no longer acted, dressed, or looked like the girl she was supposed to be.

She knew that she would be alone unless she was commanded to take up the role of wife because it had been too long since she had been shaped to fit this character that she was to play and she would not be able to slip out of it quite so easily. She was in every way that mattered a man and no man seeking a wife would want her. (Not that she would want them either, taking a husband would mean taking attention away from Hashirama and even now she had no idea how he survived even half of what he did. He would not last long without her.)


	4. Tobirama 4 / Skull 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like eventually this will not follow canon as much as I thought it would initially. I will probably change canon periodically as it suits me but if there is some specific cannon fact or event that you think should be mentioned let me know. (ps I will probably also play with the timeline at one point, maybe, honestly the timeline with ages is a bit complicated)

Tobirama Senju died, but that was okay because she never really thought that she would survive as long as she did anyway. She never wanted to live on past the death of her brother but life never really seemed to take her wants into account.

Still, what was upsetting was not that she died, but rather that after she died she woke up.

There had been a stretch of time that felt both too short and too long where she did not understand what was happening to her and really did not want to understand. She could hear words through a fog but she never tried to understand what was being said. She cried like she hadn't in years because she could see nothing preventing her, but the dramatics didn't last long. Mostly, during those first few years what she felt most acutely was apathy and having no way to communicate, no ability to move, she stayed that way until her new parent's fright shook her from it.

The new body she had been born in was similar to her former one in looks but it felt strange. First, her chakra did not circulate as naturally as it had, and it almost felt as though it was carving itself a new pathway inside her body, as if this body had not been meant to hold chakra of any kind. Second, was that this body felt distant and did not move naturally for her. 

What she did not wonder about, what she did not question, was why. The answer was obvious to her: Punishment.

This body that she had been forced into was done as a punishment. She was reborn to atone for the sins of her former life. What sin in particular was the question she asked herself because she had committed a lot of them. She went through them from time to time:

The murder of children (only when ordered and she never liked it, but she did it) was eventually crossed from the list if only because back during the warring clans period it was an all to common sin and she didn't seem to be in a common situation.

Letting her brother be killed was also eventually crossed from the list and that was because even she could acknowledge that the shinigami probably could not care less about a single soul in the face of all of them.

And so went her list until she came upon the obvious one, Kuchiyose: Edo Tensei.

She had made the decisions to mettle with the natural cycle of life and death itself and her situation now was likely the result. She knew herself to be arrogant and though its creation had been a mistake (even she could admit that) she could never bring herself to destroy the scroll or the jutsu.

In the end though, she accepted that no matter what had brought her here, or why, this was where she was and she was not one to cheat the shinigami from their due. She steeled herself to spend a lifetime without her brother, without Hashirama, and hoped it would go by quickly.


	5. Tobirama 5 / Skull 2

When she was still too small to do anything (too small to fight, too small to train, too small to be taken seriously) she watched this new life crumble as the life before it had.

She was five and had two older brothers that she could barely look at because they were so different and yet so similar to Hashirama, a father who loved her more than she could have even imagined from her other father, and a mother who was smart but quiet and reminded her of the mother she had spent so little time with. She didn't feel like part of the family, but as an outsider that they were trying to welcome. She still grew fond of them though, grew attached though she tried not to allow herself to. Tobirama had thought that opening herself up to this weakness would not be as harmful here as it would in her life before because as she grew she learned how her two lives were different. This one seemed softer. Things are not always as they appear.

There was a robbery. There were five men with guns. There was death.

She had never been so helpless. Even before she could fight she had her siblings and her clan at her side; she had her sensing. Her chakra was still carving its way through her and she had not been able to train this body, and so she found there was nothing she could do even as she watched another family be taken from her.

She knew she would die and tried to think of finally getting to see her family again, tried to accept it, but she was weak to the one emotion that Hashirama had seemed to cast off completely. Vengeance. Revenge. Retribution. If she died they would get away with it. They carried a mark, a symbol, that reminded her of the way that all shinobi from Konoha identified themselves by the mark on their headband. She had allowed herself to be naive in this world and it had costed her another family. She wanted them, all of them, to pay.

The moment before the blow struck her all she could think was,

"I don't want to die yet."


	6. Tobirama 6 / Skull 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a few of these chapters already written and so when I have time I will type up what I can. That mean that the first few chapters will probably not be too slow.

When she woke up this time she was both glad she did and worried about what that meant. She had been shot multiple time in the chest. She knew one of the bullets had hit her heart. She woke up, alive, anyway.

From where she was lying on the ground she could hear the men leaving the house so she had probably not been (dead? asleep? unconscious?) out long. Tobirama knew that she was the only person in the house still alive, the only person in this new family of hers still alive, but she made herself stay calm because while this was the first time something like this had happened in this new life it was not the first time something like this happened to her.

No, what was most interesting to her in the present were the small red and purple flames at her finger tips and gathered over the wounds she had just received. She could feel her skin, her injuries, healing itself and destroying the foreign objects inside of her. She had died, she knew she had, and yet she was breathing again. If the first time she was brought back to life was caused by the shinigami then this second time was caused by these flames of hers.

She was sad to find that this world was no different than the one before it. Hashirama's dream seemed like it really was a thing of fantasy. Even when there were no shinobi and no warring clans or hidden villages people would still find a reason to kill one another. 

Tobirama turned to this new family that she had learned to love and made note of their injuries and their pain because it would be repaid eventually. Apparently she was not done looking at the corpses of family members as she thought she was and hoped that this would be the last time now that there was no one left to loose.

There was still fire at her fingertips, purple and red twisting around each other and fighting for dominance, when she heard the sirens in the distance. It took only a second to decide what she would do. Tobirama let the fire grow and consume because she would be most effective in carrying out her revenge if they didn't know that she was coming for them.

Without a glance back she slipped from the room and packed a bag for herself. The bag had clothes, food, and the money that she had kept hidden in her room. She was lucky that when they were overturning the house they left her room alone, assuming that no five year old would have anything they would want. She finished just as the heat grew intolerable even for her, and so she pushed open her window and left the house to burn.

She would have to blend in and hide but survival was something she had been constantly been training for in her first life and she did not doubt herself. Now she had her fire (and using it had seemed to sear open her chakra pathways though they felt weak at the moment) to aid in her protection and reason to start training her body again, and so saw no reason to worry.

She would survive as she always did (even when she was not sure she wanted to).

 

 

 

(Years later she would decide to push down those blood red flames that, though useful, would make her think of Hashirama more often and make the pain a sharper one that felt too new for a loss so long ago. The red flames would make her think of the home lost to her long ago. So, she would don the purple flame and alter what she could about herself in order to try something different. She would learn to do stunts on a motorcycle, she would adopt Hashirama's personality, she would become a boy again, and she would call herself Skull.

In the future she would have the names of two lives that she would keep to herself. She would try her brother's way eventually.

But for now, her goal was Vengeance.)


	7. Tobirama 7 / Skull 4

When the second curse she had been subjected to broke she grew up again.

She had hated being small. She had hated having to get used to fighting with a shorter reach. She had hated that those she had been tied to were so easily fooled. She had thought that maybe this is why she was needed here, and maybe placing her under this curse was why the shinigami had brought her here, but now that the curse had been broken she was tired. She hated that she seemed to serve no purpose.

Her fellow Arcobaleno failed to notice that when the curse broke she did not take her place within the same sky as them. She guessed that they had spent so much time overlooking her and ignoring what she did that it was second-nature to them now. She saw no point in telling them what they did not notice for themselves.

It didn't help that Tobirama felt more distant from the others now than she ever had before. With Yuni there, and pulling at them, they seemed to get closer, but whenever Yuni reached out to touch her own flames to Tobirama's cloud flames her storm flames (hidden and protected) seemed to cry out in agony and loss. Any attempt Yuni made to pull Skull (Tobirama) into her sky caused Tobirama more pain than even using her storm flames did. Yuni felt maybe an echo of that pain because even without being told eventually she slowed her attempts.

Tobirama pulled away and hoped that Lal, with her secondary cloud flames, would be able to take the place that might have been hers if she hadn't still been suffering from the loss of her own Sky a lifetime ago. (Because that was what Hashirama was, she had no doubt that Hashirama had been her sky and even now the only sky she would ever accept)


	8. Reborn 1

Reborn had spent the last few months watching Skull and seeing things he had either dismissed in the past, or hadn't been there to witness.

Skull seemed withdrawn from the rest of them, and everything about him felt fake, artificial. Reborn did not know how much of this had always been there and how much of it was new, but he didn't think it had been so bad before, so obvious. Every attempt to reach out to Skull was met with false smiles and exaggerated actions, and Reborn despised how blind he must have been for even a portion of this pretending to slip past him. (And he knew some of it must have because while some of this might be new, there might be more acting than usual, the mask was too perfect to have been crafted recently.)

Now, watching Skull, Reborn wondered how many things he had taken at face value that shouldn't have been. He wondered what else about Skull wasn't fake, better yet he wondered what about Skull was real. His attitude? His personality? His appearance? His name?


	9. Tobirama 8

When the Konoha was founded Tobirama ended up being a central figure and pillar of the village but also an outside within it. Her brother was the idealist and the charismatic one who could get everyone to follow wherever he thought to lead them. He was elected the Hokage to no surprise of hers, but she was the one who did his paperwork. She wrote up their alliance agreements, determined how much would be paid in taxes and by who, what would be built and where it would go, where their food would come from and how much they would pay for it, what jobs they would take, and how the village would survive. Her brother was a flurry of positive feelings and far-fetched dreams, but she lived in the real world and she strove to make what she could reality.

Still, no matter what she did for the village and Hashirama, her brother stayed distant from her. She noticed that their relationship seemed to be unraveling at the seams and that he rarely went out of his way to spend time with her anymore. She wondered if she had made the right choice every once in a while, but she did not examine her past choices often if only because it was useless.

They continued on, continued building, despite feeling as if they were balancing on a knife's edge.

Things came crashing down around them when Madara snapped. Hashirama seemed to move just beyond her reach at that point and it felt like a permanent shift that she could not undo. There was a wall between them that she could not break down, a gap that she could not close, and a shattered bond she could not fix.

That was the first time she wished that Izuna had lived, even if that meant that she had not.


	10. Tobirama 9 / Skull 5

Tobirama, Skull, or whoever she was in this moment, stood alone on a branch near the top of a tree that she had climbed. Looking back on her last life she wonders if flames had been a thing that they just hadn't discovered, something that was unable to be unleashed because of some differences between the worlds. Maybe their ability to use chakra had stopped them from manifesting flames.

She wondered mostly because if Madara had been a guardian of her brother as well (because there was no way Hashirama wasn't a sky and no way she hadn't been his guardian) Hashirama's reaction when Madara broke their connection makes so much sense. It also makes her think that maybe her brother didn't really hate her. That he didn't regret that she had been the one to survive that final battle with Izuna.


	11. Yuni 1

Yuni sat alone at the table in the kitchen in the house that the Arcobaleno shared. It was one of the few times that she had been left without someone watching over her and she wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. The curse was broken and everyone was back in the original bodies, and Yuni was glad to see that they were doing good, though it had been taking some of them longer than others to get their coordination back after having been in a different form for so long.

She sat at the table waiting for Skull to enter. She knew that he would be back soon despite not being able to see much about him, despite all that she could see about him being blurry. Skull kept a vaguely consistent schedule that made it fairly easy to guess where he would be at certain points during the day.

Skull did arrive eventually. He headed straight to the fridge without seeming to notice her. Before he could leave though she spoke up, “Why can’t I see you?”

There was a pause and Skull looked back at her. His eyes had darkened and there was a glint of red in his eyes. There was something ominous about how he relaxed his body and all she could feel was fear as her instincts seemed to scream at her to move, run, escape. It all happened in a second and then it was gone. He gave her a big smile and laughed loudly. “I don’t know why you can’t see I, the great Skull-sama!”

He shrugged his shoulders and rubbed the back of his head awkwardly, messing up his own hair even more. He waited a moment longer and when she said nothing else to him he chuckled again and then turned away to head to his room.

“Mom and Luce couldn’t see you either, even less that me.” Yuni murmured to herself and tried to forget about how much he had looked like Reborn in that second, only scarier because she didn’t know enough about him to be assured that he wouldn’t attack her.


	12. Fon 1

Fon could sense in Skull power and strength that didn’t make sense if he had really lived as a civilian as they all had assumed that he had.

From the moment that Skull had tumbled into the room where they had all met, colorful and clumsy and soft-looking, Fon could sense within him a honed blade, razor sharp and poised for attack. He didn’t know what was real and what was not when it came to Skull but everything about him seemed contradictory.

Fon had seen Reborn tense for a moment, just as Skull had entered, but had seemed to brush off what he had felt. It was helped along by the fact that Reborn was arrogant and when Skull had said that he had never heard of him before, seemingly honest, Reborn had taken that as confirmation of his civilian status.

Fon hadn’t brushed off that feeling of power and danger though. At times Fon felt ridiculous for always keeping an eye on Skull, for treating him like he could be dangerous, for his estimation of Skull’s possible abilities, but he trusted the instincts that he had worked to develop. Maybe, Fon would theorize, Skull felt dangerous because of that strange energy that he could sense within Skull.

Fon wanted to know but also didn’t want to ask. He figured that one day Skull would tell them, probably.


	13. Arcobaleno 1

The Arcobaleno had gathered again after having chosen to be separated for a short number of years. Once everyone had been returned to their adult forms they had decided that it would be nice to go wherever they pleased for a while. They wouldn't be restricted by their forms and those that had chosen to step away from their family, to provide distance in order to insure their safety, could feel comfortable going back.

Reborn chose to stay with the future Tenth boss of the Vongola family. He seemed to enjoy stepping up their training and taking hem on all at the same time to prove his superiority. He also decided to take jobs that were difficult in order to make sure that his title and reputation had not been lost or degraded.

Fon crossed paths with Reborn a lot during that time because of his decision to spend a good portion of his time with his nephew. He kept I-pin close in order to train her and try to keep her from hurrying to be an assassin. She would need the training anyway if she decided to stay with the Tenth Generation.

Viper vanished and no one had enough money to figure out to where.

Verde retreated to his lab and began to appreciate being able to use normal equipment without spending so much extra time on attempting to make things a size he could use.

Cornello and Lal disappeared together. Each of them left a note for their bosses that said they would be back when they were done exploring and traveling. The others placed bets on whether or not they would be married when they came back.

Yuni was young and stayed with her family. She got to relax without her death looming.

Skull slipped away first, though her absence was barely noticed as they were all thinking about their own escapes by that point. Skull just wanted to take advantage of the fact that she was in her own body and she could now disguise herself and her obvious and out of place age wouldn't give her away.

They were seperated for about 3 years before they all got the message that wanted to bring them back together. The message had been sent to all of them in fancy script on expensive parchment asking (demanding) that they join Reborn at the upcoming Vologana party. Tsuna would be taking over soon and Reborn wanted them to show their support, after all they should be grateful because it was his actions that helped to free them.

Skull felt no less cursed than before.


	14. Tobirama 10 / Skull 6

Skull was tired. Tobirama Senju was lonely. Tobirama had lived her whole first life thinking she knew what it meant to be alone, but right now she would do anything to see her brother again and if not him then to see her students. She had come to the realization, after having spent so long here in this new world and in this new life, that the loneliness that she felt here, this isolation, was worse than it had ever been in her other life. Even if she had been an outsider there most of the time she had still had a home and people who had genuinely cared about her.

In this place that she had slowly grown accustomed to there was no one to guard her secrets or protect her back, and though she had been glad initially that there was no longer a village (her brother's dream, not hers, and yet it had been her self-proclaimed duty to protect it) there to watch over and run she felt heavier than ever before. The village had not been something that she had wanted and she had fought against it, but once it had been there and she had seen some of what Hashirama had been dreaming of she didn't want to allow it to fade. It would be harder living in a world at war constantly after discovering that peace was possible and children could be safe.

She read Reborn's invitation and sat at the empty dining room table in her tiny cabin in the middle of a forest. Between her chakra and flames this place would be near impossible to find. The seals etched around and on the cabin would add an extra layer of protection. She planned to leave it unanswered. In this form, and with a few changes, she would not be so easy to track, but this invitation would give her a chance to see them one last time before she ran. It was one of the things she was good at, and she was very fast. 


	15. Tsuna 1

Tsuna was the first to sense that there was something not quite right, though he couldn't figure out what it was that was setting his nerves on edge. The party had started a few hours ago (the implied time and not the one on the invitation because apparently, there was two and knowing what they are is important) and most of the guests had already arrived. The ballroom was a jumble of noises but all of them sounded positive and happy. Still, there was something not right and he didn't know what it was.

He ducked as a wine glass went careening over his head. Xanxus appeared to have thrown it at Squalo, but he had jumped out of the way shouting all the while. The Varia had arrived about an hour ago and they had entered with all of their usual violence. Xanxus had glared at him for a bit before moving on to shout at his subordinates, and as always Squalo had begun to shout back.

Hayato Gokudera had taken offense at their behavior and then the fight had started. Between one explosion and the next most of the archebano had seemed to materialize. This was of course excluding Reborn who had been there harassing him from the start (actually had he ever stopped?) and Skull who had yet to show up.

Logically, he knew that no one would be stupid enough to attack here while everyone was armed and always ready to fight, and yet, his intuition was sounding the alarm. This was not a drill. He flinched at the sound of another glass shattering and only hoped that his intuition was right about whatever it was not being immediately dangerous to them if they did nothing first.

He spun around when his intuition screamed. A few more glasses shattered but they were being dropped, not thrown, and there were a number of echoing gasps of surprise. He couldn't look away from the large oval portal being pulled open not too far in front of him. It was the abyss and there were people exiting it.

God, why couldn't his life be normal, just once.


	16. Reborn 2 / Fon 2

Reborn and Fon had stood next to each other comparing their latest job requests, their own unneeded but added anyway flourishes, the students they were training, and anything else they could think of in order to try to one up each other. They were also silently basking in the returned abilities and the power that they now had since they were no longer trapped in their child-like bodies.

Reborn shot another sweeping glance over the party and gritted his teeth when he noted that Skull had still not arrived. Obviously, they had not spent enough time together lately if he was beginning to forget that a request from Reborn was a demand, and that a demand from Reborn was not to be ignored for any reason. In fact, even being dead was not an accuse that Reborn would accept.

“Looking for someone?” Fon asked Reborn with a placid smile as he saw Reborn subtly logging everyone who was in attendance for the third time in as many minutes.

Reborn raised an eyebrow at him, but before he could respond, probably with something rude or snarky, there was a crashing sound and a portal appearing near the middle of the room. Reborn immediately shot forward with Fon following just behind him. The people between them and the portal either instinctively stepped out of their way, or were frozen in shock and were, therefore, moved from their path by force.

Fon wondered why nothing ever went as expected around the Vongola.


	17. Orochimaru 1

Orochimaru had been backed into a corner and it was not a place that he liked to be, but he had already decided to join the Allied Shinobi Forces. They were losing and slowly they had begun to call forth more of the dead to join their side in the battle for survival. He knew that eventually they would win, they had to. What would happen after though was up for debate. Still, for now, they had something bigger to worry about.

During his first use of Kuchiyose: Edo Tensei (Tobirama Senju-sama’s jutsu that he had improved upon, fixed) after his revival he called upon the first four Hokages. Or, he had tried to at least. Maybe it had been a little too optimistic of him, and more than a little out of character, but despite failing to summon Tobirama-sama before when he had been fighting Hiruzen Sarutobi-sensei he had tried again. And failed again.

They had been useful and no one had asked why it was just those three he summoned. Then the fight had gotten harder and Madara Uchiha had been revived completely so the number and power of their enemies increased. Tobi, now identified as Obito Uchiha, was probably the weakest of their enemies now that the remaining members of the Akatsuki had been either killed or had switched sides, and that meant nothing good considering how powerful he was. Then there was the newly revived Madara Uchiha, who they were really only managing due to having Hashirama with them (and Orochimaru was getting the sense that one of the only reasons it hadn’t been so bad was because neither of them were trying too hard to kill the other). The last two, Zetsu and Kaguya, had been what made their battle seem impossible to win.

The hidden villages had banned together gathering all of their forces to occupy Kohona and sending the civilians who had remained out of the village for their own protection. Most of the hidden villages had lost at least half of their shinobi during the first few battles when allying with each other had seemed both impossible and needless.

When they could no longer afford to lose any more ground, lose any more people, Orochimaru had been asked by a reluctant Tsunade to revive a few more allies. She hadn’t asked for anyone specifically but she had always been a bit too easy to read. And so, during his next useof Kuchiyose: Edo Tensei he brought back Jiraiya, Itachi Uchiha, Kimimaro, a few of the more powerful recently dead, and once again tried to revive Tobirama-sama (which once again failed to work).

Tsunade had been glad to finally have her other teammate back, and Sasuke had become emotional upon seeing his brother, but overall everyone was glad for the increase in allies. Hiruzen had given him a strange look though, as though he had seen something curious, but he did not say anything. For the moment, anyway.

When their new allies had become a common enough sight on the battlefield, and the initial surprise and gratitude had worn off in the face of more White Zetsu and the worry the Black Zetsu might be watching at any point in time. Jiraiya had spent his first week alive creating a seal that would stop any spying at all, focusing on Zetsu, and placed it in spaces where they would create their plans. They worried that if too many places were warded there would a dramatic retaliation either out of worry about not having eyes inside the village or anger at being blocked. Besides, one of the best advantages would be not allowing the other side to know that they could hide if needed.

It didn’t take too long for Orochimaru to be asked again if he could revive others. This time he chose old Kages who were known to be powerful, and at least partially reasonable. He also brought back a number of his fellow Akatsuki members who he could force to comply even if they didn’t want to (if he tried to force ‘good’ people to help the softer members of their group got all huffy but no one would really care about the former Akatsuki).

It was a few devastating battles later that the Kages, who were running their side together, brought him a list of people who might be useful and asked him if he was willing to use Kuchiyose: Edo Tensei again. It seemed that no matter who they brought back or what they did they were always being forced on the defensive. Madara, Obito, and Zetsu would attack and Kaguya would keep them from doing any damage and end those who got too close to succeeding. They had a number of people researching those revived to find a way to free them and allow them to truly live again, but for now their current forms were for the best and there were so many other, more urgent, matters.

“I will do what I can,” Orochimaru had answered vaguely before wondering away from his teammates and the current Kages.

He had not gotten far when his old sensei had found him, on purpose surprisingly enough, “Hello Orochimaru,” He had glanced at the scroll with the list in it and spoke again, “I was curious why you had yet to bring back Tobirama-sensei, who you so admired. I assume is name is one they asked for this time?”

Orochimaru narrowed his eyes, “He is but it is unlikely he will be revived.”

“May I ask why you are refusing to summon him? I would have thought that he would be the first person you brought back. I remember you following him around as a child and how much you admired him as you grew. I would think that you would recognize the help he could provide us.”

Orochimaru gritted his teeth. Just because he had decided to help didn’t mean that these former comrades could question him, or doubt his choices. “I have not refrained from summoning him, but rather I have found that _he_ ,” here Orochimaru viciously bit out the wrong pronoun a strike against Hiruzen that he would not even recognize, “is unable to be summoned.”

“Ah,” his old sensei nodded sagely, irritating him further, “I had thought that might be the case. The Uchihas have been helping me to look into it and we think we might have found an answer.”

At that moment Orochimaru had been torn between ignoring him and trying to figure it out himself, now that he knew that not only was there a possible answer but also where to look, and following Hiruzen now to be told the answer to the problem without having to wait.

Orochimaru had stormed off and went to revive the ones on the list that he could, and that night, when his patience had finally run out, he went and found his old teacher and demanded to know why Tobirama-sama could not be summoned.

Less than one month later they were opening a portal for five of them to enter.


	18. Itachi 1

Itachi was the one who first realized that there might be an actual problem.

Hiruzen, Hashirama, Minato, and Tsunade had been gathered at one of the shinobi bars. They were drinking and laughing and sharing stories from their times as Hokage. Minato had the fewest as he had been in office the shortest amount of time and Hiruzen had the most. Most of Tsunade’s featured Naruto prominently so both Hiruzen and Minato had been glad to hear them. Hashirama’s tales were the most interesting though.

Sasuke had been dragged out to drink with his age-mates by an overly excited Naruto, and since he did not want to be the only one to suffer Sasuke had grabbed onto his brother’s sleeve while still in his range in order to force him along. Itachi hadn’t argued and complied with his brother’s demand silently but with a slight smile at the friendship.

When they had gotten there Sasuke had been whisked away with the others and though he could have left Itachi took a seat at the bar and just watched his brother noting every expression of happiness that crossed his face.

“I wish Tobes was here.”

The sentence was partly muffled as the First Hokage, Hashirama, had his face buried in one of his arm as he dramatically whined. Itachi could see the dark clouds gathering over his head (privately, he wondered if this was the same kind of genjutsu that Gai used to make flowers and sunsets appear behind him) and he couldn’t fathom why no one, not even the Uchiha’s, had thought to mention how absurd and absolutely ridiculous the First Hokage could be. Actually, having seen the Uchiha’s records from that time, he was sure it had been overlooked in favor of speculating about the demon status of the Second Hokage and worrying about the stability of their clan head.

“I am surprised that he is not, actually,” Hiruzen mused.

“Huh?” Hashirama unintelligently mumbled as he peeked at the Third from behind his arm.

“Why would you be surprised about that?” Minato asked with a glance at Hashirama and amused curiosity quirking his lips upward.

Itachi was curious too. He hadn’t meant to listen in and none of the Hokages had seemed to realize, but with how drunk they all appeared to be he wasn’t really all that surprised.

Tsunade had snorted, “No, I get it. With as often as Maru-kun followed around Uncle Tobi you think he would have been the first brought back.

The conversation had continued and the subject had been changed but Itachi had continued to wonder about why Orochimaru hadn’t brought the Second back. Even if he was over his hero-worship he should still know how strong the Second Hokage was, and they really did need the help.

 


	19. Tobirama 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly, I have a number of ideas that I kind of what to put into action when it comes to the reveal. I have an initial one but I might put random "What if" or something like that in here but I will make sure that anything that doesn't belong in this thread of thought is labeled.

Tobirama had been tired for a long time. She went on mission after mission while her brother was Hokage and when she was inside the village she took over the paperwork more often than not. Her brother was smart but she was also too soft and the last time she had been away when an important decision needed to be made they had ended up handing out tailed beasts, giving weapons to their enemies.

Now that she was Hokage there were less missions for her to go on but there were more headaches. She was in charge and everyone seemed to agree that she was the best person for the job, the most capable, but they did not trust her as they had her brother. They were wary of her and most flinched when she looked them in the eye.

The Uchiha may have thought she was a demon but they were not the only ones even though they were the most obvious about it. All she had ever really wanted was to be herself and now she didn’t even know who that was. She had always relied too heavily on her brother to show her what was best and what would make her good.

She was glad that there was finally a mission that she could go on as any traveling was nice and allowed fewer people to flinch at the sight of her or glare, waiting for her to prove herself corrupted.

The mission had given her a chance to travel with her students again. Hiruzen was improving at a remarkable rate and she would name him her successor soon enough. Danzo was powerful but he did not have any of the innate kindness that Hiruzen had. One knew how to give mercy and the other would rather drive his point home. Hashirama would have approved of Hiruzen as the Third.

Then, there was an attack and she knew that there was no way that they would all survive. 20 elite shinobi from Cloud and she did the only thing she could. Her team was sent on their way, Hiruzen named as her successor, and she stayed to hold them back.

The fight was long and bloody but one by one her enemies fell before her blade. She targeted the weaker first, slipping past their guard and attacking when shown even the slightest opening. Tobirama was agile and fast, and they had made the mistake of underestimating her.

The Gold and Silver brothers were the real problem but even they had weaknesses. They were arrogant and sure of their abilities, and worried too much about each other in the midst of battle. When she slid her sword through the neck of one of the brothers the other completely lost it.

She was tiring, her movements were lagging and she was taking more hits because of it. She was losing more blood the faster she moved, the more she pushed herself. Her opponent was in a rage though and any plans he might have had, any intelligence behind his movements were gone. The corrosive chakra was eating at her and she was in more pain than she ever remembered having gone through before, but she continued on.

Eventually a fatal attack landed itself, but it was not because of her talent he fell but his own error. He had left himself open, he hadn’t guarded his weak spot, because he had been expecting a second person there to do it for him. He died and she knew that she would follow soon enough.

Tobirama Senju had not wanted to die at the feet of her enemy though and so with great effort she moved beyond them, just far enough away that they were obscured from her view, and then collapsed against a tree. The only way she might survive this was if she could travel from one seal to another. She had been working on a variation of what already existed. Two seals that anyone could use, that were connected to each other. When someone fed chakra into one of the seals it would pull them through, convert them wholly into chakra, make it so their body lie inside there soul rather than the other way around, and spit them out on the other side.

She had the theory all written out and the math done in her lab. There was also a sample seal there as well. She had drawn it up just before they left and had yet to find time to test it. There was no better time than this.

Painstakingly she copied the circle on a scroll with her blood. By that time, she finished her vision and begun to darken and her breaths were shallow and faint. She touched her hand to the circle pushed her remaining chakra into the seal, activating it.

It might have worked but she died mid-trip, she faded before she reached the other seal.

She never could remember if she had enough chakra for its activation.

She never did realize what her actions had changed.


	20. Itachi 2

Itachi was the first one to figure out the solution to the problem only he seemed to be aware of.

After having overheard part of the conversation that the Hokages had been having at the bar Itachi had begun to wonder himself why it was that Tobirama Senju had not been brought back with the rest of the Hokages. Even later, when other hidden villages’ former leaders were being revived, he did not summon Tobirama.

He searched for possible reasons now that he had been made aware of the question. It was obviously not because he didn’t want him alive, or that he hated him, if Tsunade and Hiruzen were correct. It was also probably not because he hadn’t thought to revive him either. The only thing her could think of was that Orochimaru had tried to revive him but failed.

It took a while to find what he was looking for; searching the Uchiha clan library would have been difficult and taken more time then he would have had free if not for the fact that he used to read in here often as a child and had an idea about what the organizational system might have been before the Uchiha had seemed to stop putting effort into its’ up-keeping.

The soul was what mattered and the only reason he could find that would stopKuchiyose: Edo Tensei from working was if the soul in question was not there to call. Even the soul being taken by the Shinigami personally, as shown by Minato and Hiruzen, would not stop the jutsu from being called from the afterlife. The answer then was that Tobirama’s soul was not in the afterlife.

It didn’t take long for him to think through the possibilities and decide what the most likely reasons for a soul to be missing from the afterlife was.

Reincarnation.

Itachi knew that it was not a likely option, and yet it was what made the most sense. If it was true then they could probably find him, though they would likely need Obito’s ability to create portals (and wasn’t it a good thing then that they had Kakashi) and someone who had some kind of tie with him, some kind of bond, that could be followed.

It would be hard but not impossible.

First however, he would talk to the Hokages.


	21. Orochimaru 2

Orochimaru sat and listened to the theory. They warned him, however, that while they may find Tobirama alive in another word some things were unpredictable.

The fact that they had never found her body after her death, just a bloody seal, means that instead of her body being retrieved by the enemies when they collected those who killed her, she could be alive in another world. There were a number of possibly about what could have happened that day that they were considering now, for the first time.

She might be an old woman in another universe.

She might have died in another world leaving her soul stuck there, separated from them.

She might have gotten trapped in a kind of in-between.

She might have been reincarnated and therefore have no memory of her life before.

She might not know, or want to know how to fight.

She might be happy wherever she is and not want to help them.

She might also be waiting for them.

In a new body or her old one, she might have been stuck somewhere she could not return from, waiting for them to help her.

The discussion lasted for a while, longer than Orochimaru would have liked. They had found a way to get to wherever she was but now they were wondering if they should. They were worried about possible problems and issues and complications.

Orochimaru had tried arguing that if she did not remember there would be no harm; that even if she was old she was still brilliant; that just because they went to her didn’t mean they had to ask for her help or that she had to help them if they did, but no matter what he said they still wavered.

It was Itachi who convinced them.

It was Itachi who reminded him why it was he hated being subservient to the village and what it was like to be ignored and distrusted. Even though he was the one to study souls and had been trying to encourage the mission to find her, it was not him who managed to make them agree to it.

“If we go to another world, Kaguya would not be able to follow. Eating the fruit tied her here, to this universe, in irreversible ways. But, if any of us left she would take the opportunity to take out those she could, and Obito would be able to follow the path of his other eye. If we let slip we are seeking out the soul of Tobirama Senju, Madara would want to follow as well. Madara would not let death, reincarnation, or any other barrier stop him from destroying Tobirama, soul and all.”

Hiruzen was nodding, “Even if we do not get his help we could use the chance to take out two of the opposition. All that’s left is to decide who will be the ones to go. Enough to accomplish the task but not enough to leave those who are here weak.”

“Five should be enough,” Minato mused, “Obviously one will have to be Kakashi.”

“I am going,” Orochimaru said with a glance at the others, daring them to object.

“Two down, three to go,” Tsunade laughed, taking a drink, “So who else wants to try to do the impossible?”


	22. None 1

The first one who stepped out of the portal was a man. He was pale with long black hair, and had strange purple markings on his face and snake-like eyes. He glanced around the room and seemed to dismiss those present as a threat. Hayato started to snarl when Tsuna grabbed his arm in an effort to contain him for a moment. His intuition let him know that attacking them would be a bad idea right now.

The second person through the portal was a man following at the heels of the one in front of him. Something about him made Tsuna think of an assistant or a secretary. He had white hair and glasses and a smirk that made Tsuna nervous.

There were two boys who came through next. They seemed to be fighting with each other, attempting to throw elbows into each other, step on each other’s toes, or poke each other sharply. They didn’t look like they could be older than 18. One had blond hair, blue eyes, and whisker marks while the other boy had black hair and red eyes that faded to black once he had glanced around the room. It seemed that he too had decided none of them were a threat to the group.

The last one through the portal knocked both boys on the head causing them to grumble. He was the strangest looking of the group. He had silver gravity-defying hair and a black mask that covered most of his face and left only his eyes visible, one of which was silver and the other was the spinning red the boys had been. He pushed the headband down over the red eye after the portal closed. He barley seemed to note that there was anyone else in the room and reached into the pouch on his leg even as he swayed just barely.

His friends tensed around him, worried that the strange man would pull a weapon. Takashi tightened his grip on his sword and Tsuna could see Squalo doing the same from across the room. What he pulled from the pouch wasn’t a weapon though it was a book, a book that looked like porn.

There was a second of silence.

The man now reading his book lifted his other hand without looking up and said, “Yo.”

And then, Chaos


	23. Tobirama 12 / Skull 7

Skull washed the purple dye out of her hair and used her flames, the purple ones, the cloud flames, to lengthen it until it reached her waist. She had never had long hair before, but though it felt strange to her it also succeeded in making her look different. It would take some getting used to but as a shinobi she had learned to dismiss distraction and this one was actually very small in the long run. She wondered if anyone who had met her from either world would recognize her as a girl, but pushed the thought from her head as soon as it had entered. She only needed to fool those who knew Skull and might eventually look for him.

With that in mind she wiped off the makeup that she had made sure to keep on constantly as Skull and removed the painted-on tattoos. She decided to keep the piercings on her lip and ear though she replaced the chain with a silver ring on her lip and a stud on her ear. In the last year, she had added three more studs to that ear and put three in total on the other. She removed the one under the center of her lip. This way the number and placement of them would be different.

She felt a little closer to Tobirama Senju. The only part of her that was different was her eye. They stayed purple. From the moment she activated her flames for the first time, they had been purple and it was because she was always using her flames at this point, it was mostly just an unconscious decision at this point.

She removed her biking outfit and slipped on black pants that hung around her waist but were easy to move in and were tight enough not to get caught on anything while running or fighting. She pulled on a blue tank top (blue used to be her color like water used to be her element) and a black mesh top to wear over it.

This new outfit revealed something that Skull had hidden. Seals. Seals were something that she had spent time and energy learning in her first life, something that she had become obsessed with and though things were different here she still studied them and the more she used them the more she felt there was something that eluded her.

Still, seals, no matter the things she created with them, were something that she could not give up. She put a storage seal on her neck and in it she placed a sword that she had crafted for her by a master and one that she had improved upon. She had it crafted with her former sword as a template, and added seals to strengthen it so that it could cut through just about anything, seals to disrupt ninjutsu and flames now that she knew about them.

There was a seal on her arm that held food, money, backup weapons (a lot of different kinds) jewels, a lot of different metals, and any forged documentation that she might need.

There as another seal behind her left ear that held all of her notes on every topic she had even thought to study, and there was a final seal on her waist. That final seal held water, enough of it to fill more than 9 medium sized likes.

Those were things she had always had, though she had kept them hidden, but now she was cutting ties and starting over and that could be dangerous. She liked her clothes with protection seals to serve as a subtle armor and made sure she was ready for war. Tobirama knew how to prepare for nothing less.


	24. Reborn 3

Reborn pointed his Leon-gun at the man who had stepped through the portal first a as he looked like he would be the one most likely to give them answers, and at least the second one through seemed to be a subordinate of his. Still, he kept part of his attention on the man who had stepped through last because he already wanted to shoot him for the disrespect (and only those who are powerful could show that kind of relaxed disrespect because if he had been weak someone else would have killed him for it already unless he was a civilian, and that didn’t seem to likely).

“What are you doing here?” He asked as his fedora tilted downward and shadowed his eyes.

He wasn’t answered, instead, he was actively ignored. The blond one finally seemed to be paying attention as he looked around the room excitedly. He frowned as he seemed to be unable to find what he had been looking for, “Oro-teme! I don’t see the Second Hokage anywhere! Oro-teme, I thought you said this would work?!”

The teen spoke in a strange dialect of Japanese. It was understandable, but spoken with an accent that he didn’t recognize.

The dark-haired teen rolled his eyes and muttered “Dobe,” under his breath, and then said, “Itachi was the one who suggested this, so it will work.”

Glasses shook his head, “Naru-chan don’t be mean. Orochimaru-sama and the others said that they could get us close. They said it would we would arrive where the highest density of energy was within that range. If we were lucky he would be there, if not we have to search,” as he finished Glasses pushed up his glasses with a singular finger causing them to glint sharply as the light was reflected.

Reborn fired a bullet between the intruders, tired of being ignored.

“What are you doing here?” Reborn asked darkly, this time in Japanese.

Four sets of eyes landed on him the second that he fired, the one with the silver hair was still reading his porn and didn’t even glance at the sound, but then the dark-haired teen grunted, “Hn,” and looked away.

The one in front, Orochimaru?, seemed to smirk as he took half a step forward, “How interesting this place is. Don’t you agree Kabuto?”

“Yes, Orochimaru-sama.”


	25. Tsuna 2

Tsuna watched the five men for a moment. They were dangerous; his intuition was telling him that they were dangerous, but it was also telling him that they weren’t here for him or his friends and they weren’t planning to attack.

“We’re looking for the Second Hokage!” the blond, Naru-chan?, shouted.

The dark-haired teen standing next to the blond huffed, “Dobe, they wouldn’t know him as the Second Hokage. We’re looking for Tobirama Senju.”

“Well, Sasuke-teme,” Naru-chan?, bit back, “They might not know him by that name either! Old man Hokage said he might have been reborn or something.”

“Children, you’re making us look bad,” the one with the silver hair standing at the back of the group, still reading his porn, yawned.

“We’re making us look bad!” the blond screeched, “You’re reading porn!”

“Mah, mah,” the man vaguely waved away the comment.

The one in the front, Orochimaru, flickered his eyes in the direction of the argument before moving his gaze back to Reborn with a sigh, “Sasuke, Naruto, do calm down. Kakashi please stop making things worse. No matter the name used, he is traceable by his chakra. It’s his memory we should worry about.”


	26. Tobirama 13

Tobirama enjoyed teaching, and one of the best things about the village being created was that she had been able to help with the creation of the academy. She took her students under her wing and tught them what she felt that they should know. She pointed out their weaknesses and made sure that they never allowed their skills to make them arrogant. She had always enjoyed teaching, learning, and experimenting more than fighting and killing, but she was good at the latter and the latter was what the clan had demanded of her.

The Senju, following the lead of her father, refused to allow her to teach the children of the clan. They were worried that she would be a cruel teacher and thought that if she was any good at it she would have had students before. The only ones she had trained though had been her younger brothers and that had been in secrecy so their father would not think that they had gotten too attached to her. She had tried to teach them all that they might need in the future, but their training moved too slow to get them to the level they would have needed to be at to survive.

The Uchiha would also not allow her to teach their children, they would not trust her so soon after the war between them. She did not blame them. Who would allow someone who killed so many of their clan to train their future generation? It was because of the tension that existed and the wish of a number of clans that she not be involved in teaching the children, that she removed herself from the academy and only helped them through work on the board.

It was sad to her that the first children she was able to teach, not counting the training younger her had given her little brothers, were not of her clan, but it did not diminish the joy that she felt as she taught them and they listened to and respected her. They reminded her of the past, and she missed those few cousins of hers who hadn’t listened even when their parents tried to dissuade them from training with her because they had seen her on the battlefield and wanted to be as good as she was. She had seen most of their deaths herself in the middle of fights where she could not get to them fast enough. She loved that these were students that she was given a chance to not only train, but to protect as well.

Eventually, those students of hers grew and learned and drifted away from her. They took on their own specialties and developed their own friendships and only sought her out when they needed something. She didn’t mind.

Then, those students of hers, gained students of their own. Hiruzen, the softest of her students, and the one that most reminded her of her brother, took on his students. He had been given Tsunade, her grand-niece, Jiraiya, a loud orphan boy who was both cheerful and excited, and Orochimaru, a boy alone and curious who made her think of herself more than she would have liked.

She didn’t know why she first offered but eventually she had started giving him lessons in science and research. She taught him jutsu creation, and she was just as happy as she was surprised because she did not think that these were skills that she would be able to pass down because most thought them to be strange and useless.

She also saw his downfall. She didn’t know when it would happen but as he learned she knew that eventually he would hit a breaking point. He was too much like her. His curiosity was like her own, the same curiosity that that driven her to create a long list of Forbidden Jutsu and the same need to know that prevented her from destroying her research and knowledge even when she knew that it was too dangerous to use. He had all of her flaws, but he did not a Hashirama to draw a line that he would not cross, he did not have someone that he would listen to there to draw a line for him. She loved her students and she loved Hiruzen but she could see the way that he turned away from Orochimaru’s flaws and despaired in his differences.

She had thought that she would have time to find a way to help him establish those boundaries, draw his own lines, but in less than four years she would be head, and whatever half done lines they had managed to draw would be dismantled and erased in the face of the village’s, and his Sensei’s, distrust of him.

She wondered why it was that no matter her speed she could not be fast enough to save anything.


	27. Orochimaru 3

Orochimaru looked up to Tobirama Senju, his Sensei’s Sensei. Senju-sama had looked at him and had seen his curiosity and his willingness to cross lines that would have scared the average person, but he had not turned away. His sensei had though. Hiruzen had seen how he would poke and prod at things in order to get the answers that he sought and he had been upset and angry, and he had then pretended that it didn’t happen.

What had tied him to Senju-sama more than anything else though was when he had yelled at the Second Hokage. He had been angry and frustrated and ignored, and he had lost his temper and his carefully crafted mask of disinterest and broken apart violently.

“You could never understand what it means to be an outsider! A stranger in the village that should be your home!”

“Orochimaru,” Tobirama had said calmly, trying to get his attention.

“No! I mean it! Sensei thinks I’m strange and wrong, and my parents have left me alone! They’re dead and I have no one! They died and I’m still here! I swear that I will never die! And how could you understand any of that, how could you understand what it means to be different!”

And Tobirama had been silent at first and Orochimaru had thought that he had won, but then he had signed and began to explain.

Orochimaru learned that Tobirama was not a man but a woman. That she had always been a girl but her being one had been undesirable to her father. She explained that with the Clan Wars happening every member of the clan had to do their part and since her father had declared her disfigured because of her appearance, and she had been good at fighting, he had been commanded to take the appearance of a boy in order to serve her purpose. She was strange and useless as a woman and a demon and weird as a man. She knew he had heard the rumors of her demon status and explained that they weren’t new.

She, who could have walked away and left him there alone, like he was used to being, had instead tried to comfort him. She told him her most closely guarded secret. She became his hero, his favorite Hokage, and his new goal.

He learned all he could from her and, when she left him permanently, he continued with his research and his experiments. She had died. He would not.


	28. Orochimaru 4

Even after he had tried to quell the fighting Orochimaru could still hear Sasuke and Naruto trading blows with each other. Kakashi was being not at all helpful as he was still reading that porn Jiraiya, his insufferable former teammate, had written. He was only thankful that he had been able to bring along Kabuto as their healer because he might have snapped and killed someone already otherwise.

The people that they had appeared near were still trying to question them but he had other things on his mind at the moment and saw no reason why he should be forced to answer them. Instead he searched for the chakra signature that he wanted to find.

It wasn’t there, and then suddenly it was.

When he finally felt it in the distance he took no time to explain himself and began moving forward to follow it. The rest of his tag-alongs had decided to follow him when he began to move and he noted that some of their audience had as well.

Orochiamru really didn’t care about that at the moment though. He had found Tobirama-sama’s chakra signature and was following it before it could be suppressed again. It was heading to the edge of his range as it began to move away and so he was forced to pick up the pace.

With any luck this meant that Tobirama had retained her memory and would be able to help them by fighting in the battle that was sure to happen soon. After all he hadn’t much hope that their enemy wouldn’t succeed in following them sooner rather than later.


	29. Tobirama 14 / Skull 8

Tobirama had stayed within a few miles of the party that she was supposed to be attending at Reborn’s request, but didn’t move any closer. She wasn’t going to go. She had stayed within the mafia and as the character she created for too long already. All she wanted right now was to be herself again and to do that she was going to disappear. She did not plan to see any of them again, and so she figured that she could stall her departure for a few more hours in order to sense their flames and be sure they are safe one last time.

When she had joined them in that first meeting she had still been young in body. She hadn’t kept track carefully, but she knew that she had not yet reached 20. In this world, she would have been counted as just barely an adult but in her world, she had already had a pile of bodies in front of her. In this world, she had spent a lot of time changing faces and occupations and Checker-face had caught her in a softer one, in the one that she went to between faces. Even now she isn’t sure she wouldn’t have preferred him to have found her in one a little closer to her own so that things might have been different. She could have admitted the deception, she guessed, but being a shinobi had been carved into her bones and beaten into her skin, so giving herself away, even now, seems like an impossibility. Breaking cover did not happen unless you were prepared to die.

Learned habits were not easily breakable.

She leaned against a tree, quietly contemplating what life could have been for her, those slight changes that might have changed reality.

And that thought led her to the next one. People didn’t have chakra here, not really, flames were close and sometimes they felt so similar she could have pretended that they were and that she was home, if she wanted to, if she had been that kind of person. Something about this world, this universe, opened a sense she already had inside of her but was dormant. (Or at least this is what she had assumed because her flames and chakra had been twisted around each other so naturally it felt as if both had always been there but she just hadn't known it until that moment.)

When she had felt the pain of her chakra here she had initally theorized that it was because it was unnatural within this body, but now she wondered if it had just been that she had too much. She had more chakra now than ever as what she had started with here had been what she had been capable of when her last life had ended. It seemed like the human body had a variety of senses and sources of power, but what the world grants you changes. Maybe it was the atmosphere, history, creation, or some other force, but Tobirama would argue that each world has its own source of power and a group of people who benefit from it. She posited that anyone from this world who stepped into her old world and any from her old world who entered into this one, who have a second sense, a second power, granted to them if their body was capable of handling it.

It was that thought she lingered on and that thought that made her doubt herself when she sensed something that she knew she shouldn’t be able to sense.

She tried not to indulge too heavily in could-have-beens, impossibilities, and theories that were completely untestable.

She didn’t feel mistaken though. 

She didn't think she was imagining things.

She could sense chakra. Specifically, she could sense Orochimaru’s chakra and four others that she did not recognize. One felt too close to her brother and the other felt too close to Madara, and neither made her feel very good about the situation.

For just a second, she couldn’t breathe; all she could do was hone in on what had just appeared, and try to figure out how it was possible. Then, that second was over. She took a breath and forced herself to relax and think things through. Chakra signatures were not impossible to fake though it was difficult and no one here knew how to use it so they wouldn’t know that there was anything to fake in the first place. But, even if it wasn’t real, even if this was an ambush or attack or trick of some kind, she needed to know for sure.

She flared her chakra lightly and when Orochimaru’s flared back in return she turned and headed into the forest nearby where there would be no civilian observers and a smaller chance of the Vindice being called if something too loud or strange happened.


	30. Reborn 4

Reborn was not going to let these who appeared in the middle of the room leave without an explanation. And once they told him how they had done it, he would kill them painfully for their disrespect. They would give him an explanation, one that would tell him who was at fault and who else needed to die. No mist should be able to overpower the protections for this place, and even if it was possible no one who could do so would have stayed unknown.

Now that he was taking a good look at them, he knew something was wrong. These people had to be powerful in order to get in to a ball guarded by the Vongola and yet if they had been they would have been known to him.

Nothing stays a secret in the mafia. If they were strong enough to do this there should have been rumors, stories, or something. These people had an aura of strength and yet they were unknowns. It only got weirder from there. None of them were active.

There was a blond who he could tell was a sky, powerful and vast, and the moment he went active Reborn could only imagine the fight to earn a place as one of his elements. He had a stupid smile and kept poking at the one with dark hair; they both looked to be no older than 18.

The dark-haired teen the sky was poking at and trying to trip, who had been fighting with the sky since the moment they had appeared through that portal, and who never moved far enough from the sky that he would be out of his reach, was a cloud. He loomed darkly and scoffed at the sky’s actions but he never allowed more distance between them than he could cross in less than a second.

Glasses, the one that had been called Kabuto, was a lightning, though Reborn could maybe detect a bit of sun flames too. He was aggressively focused and it seemed that his obsession was the dark-haired leader, Orochimaru. It was interesting that he seemed to feel no pull to the sky in his company, but Reborn, rethought that statement, and decided that maybe it was not so unusual, Kyoya did have his own followers that didn’t fall under Tsuna’s sky.

Speaking of the one they called Orochimaru, his mist flames and cloud flames seemed to exist within him in near equal measures. If he had to pick the strongest Reborn would probably declare it to the be mist, but it was close.

Finally, there was the man in back. Reborn could sense the largest number of flames in him. His rain flames seemed to be the strongest but he had a good amount of storm and mist flames too, and a small amount of lightning as well. There seemed to be a kind of weak bond between the sky in the group and this man, Kakashi based on what had been said. He wasn’t the kid’s Guardian though, if anything it felt like he had been a Guardian in the past and that bond had been broken.

Even looking at Kakashi grated at Reborn’s nerves, because even though they were all running now he continued to read his porn, and he had yet to show even a hint of worry. Reborn did not like feeling dismissed or underestimated.

Yes, he was definitely looking forward to being able to kill them.


	31. Fon 3

Fon was quiet as he followed just behind Reborn. The two of them managed to stay closest to the group when they took off, but even they were lagging behind. He could feel and frustration and the desire to shoot the intruders coming off of Reborn in blistering waves.

Fon did not have the anger that Reborn did, but that was because he had spent so long acting as The Eye of The Storm. He felt that because of Reborn’s anger he was maybe not seeing their guests as clearly as he could be and that because of that it would be up to him to make sure that Reborn’s temper and inevitable snap wouldn’t get any of them killed, not that he really doubted Reborn’s ability to survive no matter how strong these strangers were.

And make no mistake these people were powerful. The group of them had seemed to hold no interest in those that they had appeared near and instead seemed as if they had a goal. A specific purpose they were here to accomplish. It seemed to Fon that they really hadn’t chosen the specific destination they would arrive at, and so it had been just as much a surprise to them as it had been to everyone in the room when they arrived.

Still, Fon knew that they were dangerous but it was not really their strength that worried him and set his teeth on edge. His flame sense wasn’t as accurate as Reborn’s but he could identify them as a cloud/mist, a sky, a cloud, and a rain with at least something extra. What worried him though was that these people had a third kind of energy about them. He could sense their non-active flames, their chi, but also something else, something other.

More worrying was that this was not the first time he had sensed this third energy.

Skull had it too.


	32. Reborn 5 / Fon 4

When the group of strangers came to a stop for no noticeable reason, Reborn and Fon slipped into a hiding place within the trees that surrounded them.

The five intruders were standing on the edge of the clearing that seemed to be their destination. Orochimaru took a few steps forward and away from the rest of his group and the one reading porn, Kakashi, slipped his book back into the pouch on his leg.

The 10th, his guardians, a portion of the Varia, and the rest of the archeblano had caught up soon after and with a glare from Reborn had halted their movements. They took positions that would allow them to see what was happening and be ready to attack if they were directed, but no one really wanted to disobey the silent orders of The World’s Greatest Hitman.

A girl stepped out from behind the trees on the other side of the clearing and took a long look at those that had arrived. She had long white hair, a sword at her hip, and red markings that looked recently drawn on her face. She looked away from the five who had entered the clearing, and Reborn noted that she seemed to exhale and when she did her face became near impossible to read.

She looked poised to attack from the second that she entered the clearing but didn’t make a move.

Then, she turned back to face the group. “I had thought that maybe I was imagining things.”

“Not at all. We’ve come to find you,” Orochimaru answered with a grin stretching across his face.

It was not a nice or pleasant grin, and a number of people watching the scene before them shivered at how cold and ominous it was. There was something dark in that grin, and it seemed to spell out danger for the weak or unwary.

“I do not know that it would be for the best that I return,” she responded slowly.

“Mah, we should probably explain,” Kakashi chuckled. 


	33. Reborn 6

Reborn watched the conversation between the woman and Orochimaru happen with a growing sense of irritation. He couldn’t read her. Outside of the first expression that she had made (exhaustion with maybe a touch of sadness) she seemed to have wiped herself clear of emotions. Even her body language, outside of a sense of danger and poise to strike, gave nothing about what she was thinking or feeling away.

These people were getting more irritating by the second.

Everything about Orochimaru seemed exaggerated and fake, loud and creepy, to unnerve those who were unprepared or weak-willed. Still, everything about him so dramatic and false that Reborn couldn’t get a clear picture of what it was that he was thinking behind those masks of his. There were so many layers to the show that he was putting on that Reborn couldn’t tell what was at the core.  He could identify something like relief or happiness that seemed real enough and it was like a thread that was barely there. It was only the consistency and subtleness of the feeling that allowed him to identify it and determine it to be true.

Reborn wanted to shoot them.

The only thing that stopped him was that Fon had stopped, frozen, when the woman had stepped into the clearing, and he had caught a shadow of something, that looked to him like shock or something near identical to it, pass over Fon’s face. He couldn’t tell why, but it was worrying, especially since it was always so hard to get Fon to break his carefully maintained composure.

He did not have this kind of patience to spare.


	34. Fon 5

Fon had paused alongside of Reborn when the group that they were following had stopped moving. It wouldn’t be good to throw themselves into a situation that they didn’t understand or weren’t prepared for after all. There was no immediate reason to rush.

The man, Orochimaru, had moved to the front. The three; Kabuto, Sasuke, and Naruto; younger boys had not moved beyond where they had initially stopped. Finally, the last man, Kakashi, had tucked away his book but stayed a step or two behind the boys, acting as a kind of rear guard or sentinel.

It was when the woman, who had seemed to be waiting for them, stepped into the clearing across from them that he had frozen. She didn’t look like anyone he should know or recognize but he did. Still, he couldn’t figure out how this woman could possibly be Skull.

“I had thought that maybe I was imagining things.”

“Not at all. We’ve come to find you,” Orochimaru had answered.

 “I do not know that it would be for the best that I return,” the woman, Skull, had responded.

Skull hadn’t ever spoke about a family or a home. Was this why? Had she run away and thought it better to stay away from them? It also made him question how old she was and wonder why they had never asked her.

“Mah, we should probably explain,” Kakashi chuckled.

“Probably,” Skull said with a glance at Kakashi before turning back to Orochimaru, “I did not think I would see you again. I did not think I would see anyone again really.”

Skull (she  _must_ be Skull, despite how much she didn’t look like Skull) seems to stay impassive despite the conversation. Fon wasn’t aware the Skull could present himself? herself? to be so aloof. He wondered if Skull was naturally this stone-face figure or if this was an act. Fon didn’t really know what answer he was hoping for.

“I had hoped that I would see you again,” Orochimaru says with a sickly-sweet smile that looks fake, though what he says sounds earnest enough.

“I had not thought this would be possible, based on the world we are in, but I probably should not be surprised. You always did have talent,” Skull says before turning her attention to the others in order to more carefully survey them, “You look like Izuna,” she states apathetically as her eyes fall on Sasuke, “though you feel more like Madara.”

Orochimaru had seemed to puff up just slightly when she had spoken to him and had seemed to acknowledge his skills. Sasuke, on the other hand, had scowled deeper when she spoke to him and he seemed to be barely restraining himself from snarling at her.

“Who?” he had bit back at Skull.

The blonde, Naruto, had a partial smile and had seemed to try to get his cloud to calm down a bit. He also looked confused though, in fact the three younger members of the group appeared to be confused. (Their eyes kept drifting to Skull; they too appeared to be trying to figure out who she was and how the others of their group knew her.)

Skull raised an eyebrow at the boy and Fon could see her silently insulting his intelligence. It seemed that his lack of composure had irritated her and his lack of understanding hadn’t helped her opinion of him. Fon could barely believe this was happening. This woman was too harsh, too cold, too distant, and too subtlety cruel to be the Skull that he knew.

And, yet.

“Izuna Uchiha. The younger brother of Madara Uchiha. You do know who Madara is, right?”


	35. Reborn 7

Reborn had not liked Skull from the very moment that they had met.

They had all been summoned to a house in the middle of a forest where they would not be stumbled upon, spied on, or worry anyone if things did not go well and damage was caused as a result of their loss of temper. (Or at least Reborn assumed those were reasons The Man in the Iron Hat –Checker Face, Kawahira, or whatever that man’s name was—had decided to choose that place but honestly who really wanted to know what went through his mind.) It ended up being a good idea too, for the last reason, though that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Verde had arrived first as far as he knew and after looking around had settled himself in the main room that had a long table in it and seven chairs. The green chair had obviously been meant for him and since there was no sign of an obvious trap he settled himself in and pulled out a book that he was in the middle of ‘correcting’.

Lal had entered the meeting room about 20 minutes after him. She seemed to do a preliminary check as well and when she found nothing she noted as dangerous she too took the seat that seemed to have been meant for her. Verde hadn’t looked up when she came in, or made any sign that he had noticed her entrance at all, so Lal had just kept him in her view and prepared herself to be attacked at any moment if this was a trap.

Fon was the next to show up. He was the picture of calm and while he probably did a check of his own it was too subtle for the other two to notice. He had tried to start a conversation with the other two but neither were ready to give out information and when Viper had appeared out of seemingly no where they made it clear that payment was needed if they were expected to answer anything.

Viper had been keeping an eye on the place from the moment they were given the address. Verde was the first person they had seen arrive since then and they had already long since checked for traps or spy equipment. The place had been disturbingly clear.

Reborn had entered next. He had been confident and all smiles, though his smiles were dark and usually prompted by another’s misfortune. He paid Viper for any information they had and it proved to be less than what had been expected. That more than anything had put Reborn on edge because Viper was a known quantity (as was Fon, and he had heard of Verde before) and their information was never less than complete and beyond what should be possible to have.

Skull had entered as their conversation had begun to drift off. He was loud, colorful, and dramatic. Reborn had hated Skull instantly.

Everything Skull had done was over-the-top and emotional. He had thrown open the door shouting, “Skull-sama has arrived!”

Reborn had sensed danger a second before the door had opened and he had his gun in his hand and pointing at the intruder. He had ignored the danger though and had continued to flounce around the room excitedly. Still though, even after seeing him, Reborn still felt that warning of danger around Skull for hours (weeks really—if not months) after. He did eventually force himself to pretend it didn’t exist because there was nothing he could spot in Skull that would verify this feeling and he appeared to be the only one to sense it. (Fon felt it, but he could sense that third energy as well and had determined that if Skull didn’t prove himself to be a danger to the group then there was no reason to do anything about it. Viper could feel something off, an itching of their senses that went unexplained though not for a lack of trying, but said nothing as that would amount to giving away information for free.)

Luce had arrived shortly after Skull and had tried to get them all to cooperate without any fighting or arguing. It was a task she was destined to fail at and fail she did, repeatedly and spectacularly.

When Reborn had finally managed to convince himself that Skull was no danger things got worse instead of better. He had taken issue with the fact that this civilian (and really a civilian had been invited, that made this all seem less important and less exclusive) had managed to fool him.

Then, when everyone was sure things couldn’t get worse between them the curse happened.

They were all in agony, angry and upset about how this venture had turned out. They had been blinded and this thing, which was only supposed to be a few jobs, had turned into something that ruined their lives—permanently.

Skull hadn’t had a reaction though. He had looked at them with a blank face and cold eyes. Skull had seemed to take everything in from a distance and the only reaction Reborn had caught was him laughing hysterically one day he had come across Skull when he hadn’t been paying attention. Reborn had caught the genuine amusement and that night Skull had been back to his usual self from before the curse.

Reborn had hated Skull from that first moment, but the longer they knew each other the more Reborn was becoming sure that Skull’s purpose in life was to make Reborn hate him.


	36. Orochimaru 5

Orochimaru had figured that they would be followed into this world—not by Kaguya who was anchored to that reality that they all were a part of, but by Madara who had more freedom of movement. (Itachi’s prediction aligned with his own, though he has not surprised as Itachi was a prodigy and genius in his own right.) Madara’s resurrection had been a true one, unlike those who he had brought back, and so Madara was just as unbound as himself.

Kaguya alone would be hard to defeat, if not impossible, and adding Madara and Obito to that did nothing but make an impossible batter so far out of the realm of possibility that most refused to really think about their chances. Fighting their three enemies at the same time had proven to be not in their best interest. It divided their fighters and no matter how far was from each other the battles were Zetsu, who they really didn’t count much on his own if only because his support role was the more dangerous one, was there to help all three of them and distract those fighting. Obito randomly teleporting into the middle of battles not his own and leaving his opponents without their target was also an issue that they had come across.

Naruto and Sasuke had figured out how to seal Kaguya a few battles ago, but between the interferences and her own skills they hadn’t had a change to put their plan into action. Neither wanted to risk attempting it too early and when they weren’t likely to be able to succeed because really the last thing that they needed was her being aware of the plan and finding a way to stop it.

Hashirama would be a big help to them when it came to finishing Kaguya as he could provide the best support and defense for them, but as of now his every battle had been against Madara. (They weren’t sure how hard Madara was trying to kill him as he had not allowed even Zetsu to interfere beyond keeping others away but it still kept Hashirama distracted.)

Naruto and Sasuke had been dragged here to keep them from doing anything stupid (Tsunade and Gaara had practically forced them through the portal) and because they were main targets that no one could afford to be taken down by Kaguya while a portion of their force was gone.

Kakashi would insure Obito would follow Madara through the portal instead of just opening it for him, and would be there entrance and exit to this world.

Kabuto had tagged along as a healer and support because the only other reasonable option was the pink one and he really didn’t want another Konoha idealist on this trip if it wasn’t needed. They couldn’t take too many or else risk leaving everyone who stayed behind defenseless, and the five of them really were strong enough.

Orochimaru was annoyed that he had not found a way to make the revival permanent and self-sustaining yet, as that would have allowed Hashirama to come as well, but put that thought aside.

Right now, he had less dangerous and more amusing followers.

The people of this world really were interesting so far. 


	37. Tobirama 15 / Skull 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, this is way more popular than I thought it would be.  
> I am adjusting my world view a little bit right now. I had thought that I would post a few chapters here and a few people might like it, but wow. I am glad you guys like it. :)  
> I will admit though I don't know if I will be able to keep up this rate of chapter creation.

“Madara’s younger brother? We didn’t see any record of him inside of Konoha. I’ve looked through all of the missions taken by Uchiha and the police force members. I don’t remember anything about an Izuna.” Kabuto said pushing up his glasses.

“Hn,” Sasuke grunted with narrowed eyes.

Tobirama dragged her eyes over each one of them and wondered how the Uchiha had managed to forget what Hashirama had considered to be her greatest sin. How could they forget the act, one of the two people, that managed to drive Madara over the edge and into insanity? She wasn’t getting a good feeling about what their lack of information might mean about the state of Konoha.

“Madara had a number of brothers in the beginning, but all of them died before the founding of Konoha. The last to die was Izuna and it was only a short time later that the village was founded,” Tobirama said with her eyes weighing heavily upon Sasuke, “His death is what was blamed as the reason that Madara went mad.”

“What!?! Really!?! How did he die? Why did that make him loose it?” Naruto shouted as he jolted awake and ignored any confusion he might have still held in order to get answers that were being dangled in front of him.

There was a silence that followed that statement.

Sasuke seemed to focus in on her and loose some of that external nonchalance as he awaited the answer that she would give.

Orochimaru’s eyes drilled into her. She could see the shadow of a younger Orochimaru receiving this information and immediately taking offence on her behalf, could see the younger Orochimaru listing off all the reasons that she was not to blame. He had ranted and raged about how it was a war and she was fighting for her life as they were and that other family members and other brothers had been killed by everyone on that field, so she should not be called a demon or blamed. She could see the echo of how personally slighted Orochimaru had been. (It was one of the few times that someone else had been angry on her behalf and the only time that the other person wasn’t Hashirama or Toka – though Toka usually seemed to believe that violence could be used to solve most of those issues.)

“He died in battle,” Tobirama answered in a forcefully careless way as she remembered the act that damaged her bond with her brother, “He was slain by my blade.”

Still though, she would not show weakness and would not admit that sometimes she wished that he hadn’t been.


	38. Tobirama 16 / Skull 10 / Orochimaru 6

Orochimaru had always known about the basic facts of the war between the Senju and the Uchiha. Everyone in the village had some level of knowledge, and that knowledge was usually dependant on the age of the person in question.

The academy taught them that the village had been founded by Madara and Hashirama after they had decided to put aside their differences and end the war between the two powerful families. They were told that this was only helped along by the fact that Hashirama got engaged to Mito Uzumaki because the Uzumaki’s had a village established and would know how to help and they had unique and powerful sealing methods.

The academy wasn’t always a reliable source of information though. Orochimaru had noted, while he was a student, that they liked to speak about it like there was no hostility anymore and that with the founding of the village all past autocracies had been erased and forgiven. Orochimaru had known even then that forgiveness was not so easy, but that was why they didn’t teach the younger generation about that time too much (they would have no need to forgive an action that they weren’t aware occurred).

Later, when Hiruzen became his sensei and he started to admire Tobirama, Orochimaru took notice of the fact that the Uchiha clan as a whole seemed to hate Tobirama and have a large amount of distrust for anyone who worked to closely with her. Most seemed to discount this as a Senju vs Uchiha thing but when watching it became clear that it wasn’t Senju being targeted—just Tobirama.

When he finally asked Tobirama what it was that she had done to make them hate her, she told him about Izuna in a similar way to how she explained it now—without defense or emotion.

Sasuke narrowed his eyes. He seemed to take in everything and then he said, “The Uchiha hated you. They were sure that you were a demon.”

Tobirama tilted her head in curiosity. “Those feelings were made clear to me and they were not alone in that belief. I was responsible for more deaths in your clan than any other from the Senju, probably more than anyone else at all. Hashirama may have been stronger than me, but he was also soft. He tried to fight no one but Madara so he would not cause more death than necessary.”

While his words about the Uchiha thinking her a demon were old and known, the fact that he spoke in the past tense was interesting. She had thought that the Uchiha would have hated her until their death not hers, so the question became, ‘Who killed the Uchiha?’.


	39. None 2

With those words spoken there was a silence that seemed to hang in the air and it was left for the moment so that everyone could absorb the new knowledge that they had gained. That silence was not to last long though.

Naruto had been listening, of course he had, but he still wasn’t the sharpest kunai. When the talking had stopped, he had a chance to try to think about what was said and got stuck on one, important, detail.

“Wait! Wait! Wait! Who the hell are you lady!?! How do you even know about Konoha?!” Naruto shouted as he leapt forward a flailed around a bit.

The woman narrowed her eyes at him and then shifted to focus on Orochimaru. The silent ‘Is he serious?’ was surprisingly easy to catch despite her cold features.

The group that had traveled with Naruto had seemed to sweat-drop with varying degrees of dramatics. The other three who had listened to her speak with Orochimaru had picked up what wasn’t being said but Naruto was not one for subtlety. They should have known that he hadn’t had the same realization that was shared by the rest of them.

Orochimaru was the one to answer, “This is Tobirama Senju.”

“Hn,” Sasuke grunted in a way that sounded vaguely agreeing (or as if he was thinking that it should have been obvious by now).

“Yes, that was what I had thought. I am glade that my observation was proven to be the correct one,” Kabuto nodded pushing up on his glasses.

Kakashi just made an, “Ah,” sound as he kept an eye on Naruto’s reaction.

“Huh? That doesn’t make any sense AT ALL! The second hokage was a BOY!” Naruto shouted as he waved his arms around dramatically when no one seemed to clue into why he was stuck, “You can’t be Tobirama because you’re a GIRL!!”

“Tobirama was a female,” Orochimaru said sounding faintly amused but also a bit irritated that this was taking so long to sink in and he was being so melodramatic and loud about it, “It was a secret held by a small number of people.”

“That doesn’t make any sense either! Why do you know? Why didn’t jiji tell me?” Naruto began a series of questions that Orochimaru’s answer made him think of.

Tobirama could tell the questions were going to keep coming but that last one had confused her a bit and with a glance at Orochimaru he was encouraged to speak again and slow the incoming questions.

“Sarutobi-sensei was not aware as far as I know.”

Tobirama nodded, “Saru was not aware.”


	40. Fon 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this chapter is of a pretty good length and the next one is longer but a good amount of that will be going over the same parts in a different point of view. (I also kind of wanted to put most of this in a continuous chapter because the jumping around makes it a little hard to track at times)
> 
>  
> 
> Also, Happy Halloween (a few hours late I know :) )

Fon listened to Skull (Tobirama Senju?) talk about the deaths that he (she?) had caused and not blink or waver, and he wondered how much of Skull was real. He could not imagine that this was Skull, but not for the visual reasons or the obvious ones. Even the Skull’s aura felt a little different now that he was looking closely at it. It wasn’t different enough that he would identify this as a different person altogether but different enough that he would think he had gone through a life-changing event or trained and honed his abilities or that there had been more than a decade separating the present from their last encounter. (She, Fon should say she now, as Skull was clearly not a man.)

The group was talking about a war, a battle, and how to prove her identity. Fon wished desperately that he could find something familiar to Skull within Tobirama, but he couldn’t find anything that might be of any help to him. Her height and weight hadn’t changed. She had only the vaguest of things in common with the Skull that he had known.

When the conversation paused Fon took his chance, “Skull?”

Skull’s eyes caught his own and the younger three turned to look at him. The one called Orochimaru had moved his eyes away from the loud blond one, Naruto, and put them back on Skull with a faintly disbelieving look still in his eyes, like he couldn’t believe that Skull was there in front of him. Kakashi had pulled back out his porn while Fon hadn’t been paying attention to him, apparently, because he was back to reading it without paying attention to any of them. (Fon thought that Kakashi might actually be paying a lot of attention to them but there were a lot of mafia members and possible enemies around them so he wouldn’t say anything about it.)

“Yes, Fon?” Skull said without inflection and without care.

This whole thing was beginning to feel like an elaborate prank or a joke taken too far but Fon also felt like this was too real as well. He couldn’t even remember what he had wanted to say beyond confirming out loud that this was Skull.

Fon stayed where he was as trying to move that this point, when it felt like the world was rewriting itself around him, would only lead to him embarrassing himself.

Fon was saved from having to figure out how to follow up the confirmation that he had both knew he was going to receive and dreaded getting when Hayato, the Tenth of the Vongola Families’ Storm Guardian, and the loud blond Sky chose that moment to begin shouting.

“No way she’s that useless purple guy?!” Hayato screeched.

“Wait! Hold up! Hold up! Wait a second!” Naruto shouted flailing again, “Now he’s calling you Skull! I though Oro-teme said that you were Tobirama?!”

Skull silently seemed to sigh and just stop herself from rolling her eyes. She seemed to decide to ignore Hayato and answer the Sky, “I am both. Did you imagine I would keep the same name? I was reborn here and you must realize how unlikely it is that both sets of my parents would choose the same name. That is not even accounting for the fact that my mother and father each had a different name for me when I was born a Senju,” Skull answered flatly, though she still managed to fill each word with her utter disbelief at the stupidity she seemed to think he was showing.

She had turned away from Fon at that point and dismissed him from her mind. Fon’s muscles loosened a bit at that and he took note for the first time that her attention had caused him to tense in preparation for a fight. Skull was giving off such high levels of danger at the moment that when she turned her attention to him he had instinctively prepared to defend himself from a possible incoming attack.

Still, Fon didn’t want to let this chance to get even a few of his questions answered so he steeled his resolve and asked the question that her attention had nearly made him forget. (He ignored the things that he couldn’t make any sense of for now, like the fact that Skull claimed to be reborn as it was probably meant in a metaphorical sense.)

“What are they, you, talking about? I had thought that you weren’t part of the mafia before the curse?”

Orochimaru tilted his head like a cat who found a mouse’s actions curious but ultimately irrelevant, “Mafia? Curse?”

“Those that are not civilian and train with this world’s version of chakra. They are similar to the Yakuza and in fact a piece of the underworld, specifically the underworld in Japan, is known as Yakuza here as well,” Skull answered ignoring the second question that she had been asked.

“Hm. I see,” Orochimaru hummed in interest, “They are without chakra and yet you claim they have something similar? An ability other than chakra? What is this likeness-to-chakra, I wonder? Do they have strength?”

“Some,” Skull shrugged disinterestedly.

That seemed to be the final straw for Reborn as he decided that he would join the strangers in the clearing. Fon rolled his eyes at Reborn’s dramatics (though he was shocked with Skull’s answer as well, but not nearly as angry it appeared) and sighed. Still, Fon followed after Reborn though made sure that he did stay a bit behind him so as to not be dragged to into the middle.

This was not going to be simple or quiet.

Fun.


	41. Lal 1

Lal watched the woman that the group of had tracked down. She was cold. It seemed to Lal that this woman was distant and unreadable, and she wondered why it was that this group would risk so much in order to track her down. They had to have risked a lot to get to this point, especially when one considers that they had appeared in a ballroom full of Mafia that would have been more than willing to kill them for crashing the party. It didn’t help that they seemed to be unaware of where they would be brought.

A portal of that power could be dangerous on its own (she had listened when Mammon spoke to them about their Mist flames in case it became useful and because any information had been paid for so would not be forgotten) but to arrive at a destination that wasn’t guaranteed to be safe was only adding to the risk that they were taking.

“I had thought that maybe I was imagining things,” the woman says.

Lal doesn’t like how the woman doesn’t seem to acknowledge that these people _must_ care for her and must have been searching for a long time in order to risk all that they did to finally track her down. She seems too cold to risk anything for.

“Not at all. We’ve come to find you,” Orochimaru answered with a cold and ominous grin stretching across his face.

“I do not know that it would be for the best that I return,” she responded slowly.

It is the first hint of emotion that Lal sees and even then it is something vague and distant. It looks like caution to Lal and she wonders if that caution is for herself. Even with such a short amount of time watching her Lal can’t see her worrying too deeply for people she didn’t seem too excited to see.

“Mah, we should probably explain,” Kakashi chuckled. 

“Probably,” the woman said, “I did not think I would see you again. I did not think I would see anyone again really.”

 “I had hoped that I would see you again,” Orochimaru says.

 “I had not thought this would be possible, based on the world we are in, but I probably should not be surprised. You always did have talent,” the woman responds, “You look like Izuna,” she is apathetic when she speaks Lal notices, and it really doesn’t change no matter how her attention does, “though you feel more like Madara.”

Orochimaru had seemed to be glad to soak up positive attention and the boy, Sasuke, on the other hand, had scowled deeper when she spoke to him. Lal wondered if he was forced to tag along or if he did choose to come. This conversation is just giving her more questions but after spending so long in the CEDEF she has learned to watch and listen.

Lal sees that though all of these people seem to be completely different they seem to have some underlying thing in common. Their movements all feel coordinated despite how different they are as individuals. Most surprising is that the woman seems to fall into her position within the group without much issue. If she had to guess based on body language alone she would have put the two older men, Kakashi and Orochimaru, as co-leaders of the group before, but now that the woman is here she seems to be naturally falling into the leader role despite a kind of forced separation.

“Who?” the boy, Sasuke, had bit back.

 “Izuna Uchiha. The younger brother of Madara Uchiha. You do know who Madara is, right?” The woman asks bluntly, harshly.

Lal adjusts her opinion. The woman is cold yes but she is looking more like a harsh trainer to Lal’s eyes now rather than a stranger. Her face is still cold and apathetic but her body language from a trainer’s eye looks more like someone who sees children who have much to learn. But that doesn’t make much sense because the men look to be about the same age as her if not a bit older.

“Madara’s younger brother? We didn’t see any record of him inside of Konoha. I’ve looked through all of the missions taken by Uchiha and the police force members. I don’t remember anything about an Izuna.” Kabuto said pushing up his glasses.

And that just adds to Lal’s questions. Konoha must be a place but she’s never heard of it. If these people are as strong as they think they are, and they must think themselves very strong if they had no worries about where they might have landed when they exited their portal, then it should not be a name that she has never heard of. Setting that aside the names they spoke are with a hint of reverence or fear, all except for the woman but leaders usually don’t fear the same things, that means their reputations shouldn’t be so unknown. More than their appearance she is now questioning where they come from because none of this is making sense to her.

“Hn,” Sasuke grunted with narrowed eyes.

The explanations continue though, regardless of the fact that Lal has not yet come to a conculsion about the information already given but she won’t ignore more hints of the truth just to ground herself. She is too set in her ways and right now she needs to gather information because people in the Vongola are going to have questions and she will need to have answers, even if they might not make any sense to her right now.

“Madara had a number of brothers in the beginning, but all of them died before the founding of Konoha. The last to die was Izuna and it was only a short time later that the village was founded,” the woman says, “His death is what was blamed as the reason that Madara went mad.”

“What!?! Really!?! How did he die? Why did that make him loose it?” Naruto shouted as listened to, what appeared to be, new information to him.

Lal was not shocked by this information. She had been alive a long time because of the curse but even before the curse she knew that there were some people who just couldn’t take all that life would throw at them. It was a sad thing when one lost those things that held them up kept them going, and some people could only take so much. Some people would just break when they hit their limit.

Breaks were different for different people—some would go crazy, some would kill to make others feel the same, some wanted vengeance, some preferred justice, some would force themselves to be happy and ‘do what they would have wanted’, some took up the causes of the fallen, and others sought to join the fallen—but eventually everyone breaks and in the Mafia, and it was just another way to judge someone’s will and ability.

“He died in battle,” the woman answers in a careless way though her body tenses, “He was slain by my blade.”

All Lal sees in her is sadness and regret.

“The Uchiha hated you. They were sure that you were a demon,” the boy, Sasuke, says in contemplation as he takes in the woman standing in front of him.

With that sentence Sasuke seems to have come to a revelation about the woman though Lal couldn’t tell what it might have been about. What she could see though was that with whatever knowledge he had gain he seemed to accept her position as a leader and authority more easily than before. It looked to her that he was ready, should combat occur, to fall into position behind her and follow her lead.

“Those feelings were made clear to me and they were not alone in that belief. I was responsible for more deaths in your clan than any other from the Senju, probably more than anyone else at all. Hashirama may have been stronger than me, but he was also soft. He tried to fight no one but Madara so he would not cause more death than necessary,” the woman answered.

She didn’t seem as though that information upset her, rather she looked as if this was a fact of life and something that had been long accepted as a truth of her reality, an unchanging constant.

This woman was cold, distant, not apathetic but willing to act as though she was, and Lal had not been wrong but she could see a steel core and someone used to being in charge as well. Lal’s new worry was why someone would search out a woman like this, a woman who is used to battlefields and warfare, if not to fight in a war.

Her assessment was not what confused her though as she trusted her own judgement and ability to read people. What confused her was that she could not think of a single Family from any country who would need that ability at the moment.

There was a momentary pause brought about by the woman’s statement before the explosion of the blond Sky occurred.

“Wait! Wait! Wait! Who the hell are you lady!?! How do you even know about Konoha?!”

Lal could see the silent ‘Is he serious?’ and her body language showed she wasn’t overly amused by his lack of reasoning skills and neither did his group for that matter.

Orochimaru was the one to answer, “This is Tobirama Senju.”

“Hn.”

“Yes, that was what I had thought. I am glade that my observation was proven to be the correct one,” Kabuto nodded pushing up on his glasses.

Lal could tell that he was surprised but that he didn’t want to show it. His direct commander appeared to be Orochimaru, the same way that the other two boys seemed to follow Kakashi instinctively. She wasn’t surprised he didn’t wish question the information seeing the Orochimaru appeared to be the one closes with the woman, Tobirama Senju.

Kakashi just made an, “Ah,” sound.

“Huh? That doesn’t make any sense AT ALL! The Second Hokage was a BOY! You can’t be Tobirama because you’re a GIRL!!”

“Tobirama was a female,” Orochimaru answered, “It was a secret held by a small number of people.”

That answered a few things for Lal, but not a lot. There were still names being used that she didn’t recognize and now there was a new one. Lal didn’t know what a ‘Hokage’ was but it sounded like it was the Boss of the family. If this woman had been the Boss of their family it would explain why they seemed willing to follow her, but it didn’t explain why _she_ had never heard of any of these people. In fact, if she was a former Boss then Lal really should have heard of her before.

“That doesn’t make any sense either! Why do you know? Why didn’t jiji tell me?” were the first three questions the body could get out of his mouth, but Lal had no hope for those being the only ones, and so she really hoped they would cut him off quickly.

(They did and she was thankful.)

 “Sarutobi-sensei was not aware as far as I know,” Orochimaru answered and it seemed like that was because Tobirama hadn’t understood one of the questions being asked of her.

Tobirama nodded in agreement.

“Saru was not aware,” she reiterated, “When one has a secret, they generally do not share it with everyone.”

She waited a moment, and when Naruto didn’t follow up her answer with another question immediately, she turned her attention to Orochimaru and changed the subject, “It is good to see you again Orochimaru.”

“It is good to see you as well Tobirama-sama.”

“But now,” the woman, Tobirama, continued with hardly any acknowledgement of his response, “you should tell me why it is that you are here. I doubt it is just because you missed me, or for a history lesson on Izuna Uchiha, or to question me about my gender.”

Tobirama spoke flatly and both her tone and body language demanded an answer from them.

“Astute as always Tobirama-sama,” Orochimaru said with a smile and a flourish.

Tobirama gave him a softer look that lasted for all of a second before it cleared up and she spoke, “You don’t have to call me –sama anymore, you realize.”

There was a pause before he answered her. “Of course, Tobirama-sempai,” he said it with a smile, “Anyway, we have come here in order to find you. It ended up slowing down a few problems because it also provides us with a place to deal with a threat where Kaguya cannot see or help, which is something that is needed. Also, your help, Tobirama-sempai, would be invaluable.”

“Hey! No way! How could she help us at all! Even if she is the Second Hokage?! ‘Sides, I don’t need any help! I can take care of it and protect all my precious people, dattebayo!” they hyper blond Sky yelled.

Lal thought that he was too much like Skull, but he did have a point. If this woman, former Boss or not, had been retired for a long enough time then her skills surely would have degraded. The silver-haired man, Kakashi, stepped toward the blond, and when he was just within range he reached forward and messed up his hair, squinting his eye at him. (Lal supposed it could have been his version of a smile—she got a smile feeling from the squinted eye, which was pretty much the only part of his face showing.)

“Mah, Naruto, the Second Hokage was a powerful shinobi, and also a renown genius.”

“Yeah, but are we even sure that THIS is the Second!?”

“Hn.”

“SEE! Even Teme agrees with me!”

“Now, now, my cute little students I’m sure it’s fine.”

“WHAT!! HOW IS THIS FINE!! The Second was a boy but now he’s a girl, and we only know this ‘cause Oro-teme says so! He stole Sasuke-teme and was going to wear him!”

“Hn.”

“Mah, mah, my cute little students aren’t being very cute, are they?”

Lal watched completely befuddled. These people were in enemy territory. They were surrounded. They were out-numbered. And they were also arguing about whether or not this was the second (? Second of what?) and why she (he?) wasn’t a boy. They were slowly resembling the crazier members of the mafia—what is worse is that insanity usually meant power and that wasn’t making her think anything good about what their power levels might be.

“Anyway Oro-chan, if you could comfort my silly students and prove this is Tobirama that would be nice,” Kakashi said as he broke away from the childish argument and gave another eye smile, but this one looked a lot more menacing in comparison. (Which brought up the question how a squinting eye can give off a menacing feel.)

The woman (Tobirama?) turned to look at Kakashi. She seemed to judge him for a moment as she seemed to be considering something.

“Would a specific Forbidden Jutsu work, if Saru hasn’t had that scroll destroyed or made it too popular? Or would you prefer a seal of mine, just name one that you know of? What about a question?” She said all of this as she watched Kakashi but kept her body loose and seemingly dismissive.

“What aren’t you a guy?!” Naruto shouted, pointing at the woman.

She didn’t even turn to look at him, though she did surprise Lal by answering his question.

“I was born before the village was created and there was always fighting between clans. Girls were not as useful, except for in marriage, and so my father decided that I would better served the clan as a boy. Girls rarely fought and another solider was the best use of me,” she glanced at the sky and Lal saw her chest expand a bit more than it had before and so assumed she took a deep breath, “Anything else?”

There was a moment where the clearing was silent. Naruto seemed to be struggling with the idea of what she said if the confused look on his face was anything to go by. The other two, who had been arguing with him, though looked as if this wasn’t much of a surprise.

Orochimaru and his sidekick (assistant maybe?) seemed as if these words had no effect on them, in fact they barely looked like they were listening. Lal would have believed that—maybe—if it hadn’t been for Orochimaru’s countenance, which had grown slowly darker as Tobirama had spoken and now looked as if she was only a second from murder—violent murder and maybe torture as well.

Honestly, Lal couldn’t really blame Orochimaru for being upset if they were even half as good of friends as it seemed they were. She too could hear what Tobirama was saying. She had obviously not been wanted because she was a girl and there was maybe some vaguely insulting reason that she couldn’t be married off either—not that the idea of marrying off a girl because she was a girl wasn’t equally insulting and irritating. And, if Lal had to guess, she would say that this girl’s dad had been a real asshole.

It was during this silence that she heard Fon speak from his place on a tree branch above her and near where Reborn had placed himself, “Skull?”

Lal looked around and tried to catch sight of their cloud but she didn’t see him anywhere—that was strange as he was usually rather hard to miss no matter how much one tried.

Reborn had glanced around as well, Lal noted from the corner of her eye, but ended up just giving Fon a strange look when he too saw nothing that provided a reason for their storm to have called out their cloud’s name.

Lal was ready to just break the silence and ask Fon why the hell he was calling out Skull’s name in a situation like this, but before she could all those in the clearing—all but the woman who was looking into the forest but away from where they were at and the silver-haired man who had pulled his born back out and was now indulging in it while giggling—turned to look at who spoke, and the woman, Tobirama, answered, “Yes, Fon?”

…Wait, WHAT?!?

…

…

…WHAT THE HELL?!?!?!

Lal just kind of stayed where she was, not out of choice or because of a conscious decision, but because she could not bring her body to move. She tried to reconcile the vision of the woman that had been standing here in the clearing to the person she knew (thought she knew? What did she know really?) Skull was. Nothing she did could make the two images agree with each other. One had to be a lie, to be false, but…

Her thoughts were circular and kind of like a buzzing in her ear.

She could hear the shout of the Tenth’s Storm, “No way she’s that useless purple guy?!” but could not do anything about it because she was probably more confused than he was because he hadn’t known Skull for nearly as long as she had, and so didn’t have nearly as many expectations.

The blond sky started screeching as well once the storm broke the silence, “Wait! Hold up! Hold up! Wait a second!” Naruto shouted flailing again, “Now he’s calling you Skull! I though Oro-teme said that you were Tobirama?!”

“I am both. Did you imagine I would keep the same name? I was reborn here and you must realize how unlikely it is that both sets of my parents would choose the same name. That is not even accounting for the fact that my mother and father each had a different name for me when I was born a Senju,” Tobirama (or was it Skull?) said, and it was her (his?) words that were focusing her attention and allowing her to ignore the shock she was sure that she was going through.

Fon spoke next, “What are they, you, talking about? I had thought that you weren’t part of the mafia before the curse?”

Orochimaru looked curious by his question, “Mafia? Curse?”

And now Lal wondered what assumptions they had made about Skull purely because he (she?) didn’t know about the mafia. These newcomers seemed to be unaware and yet she knew they could be (were?) a threat. Had she dismissed a danger simply because of the way it looked? She did not like that idea. In nature, bright colors and ostentatious showings were not usually a sign of weakness but of danger, usually poison, and yet it had been dismissed.

Lal didn’t even know what to think and it was only her need to follow the conversation that kept her from leaving—her view of the world had just been decimated, because, no matter how much she wished it was a trick, Fon was not the type to play these kinds of pranks (Reborn was but he looked a little lost as well though nobody outside of the Arcobaleno would know it) and Tobirama/Skull didn’t show any sign of deception.

“Those that are not civilian and train with this world’s version of chakra,” Skull explained to Orochimaru, “They are similar to the Yakuza and in fact a piece of the underworld, specifically the underworld in Japan, is known as Yakuza here as well.”

The second question was ignored and, while Orochimaru hardly seemed to have noticed, he didn’t seem like someone who would let information like that pass without picking it apart and getting all that he could out of it. He didn’t though. Orochimaru just made a humming sound in interest and then said, “Hm. I see. They are without chakra and yet you claim they have something similar? An ability other than chakra? What is this likeness-to-chakra, I wonder? Do they have strength?”

“Some.”

Lal closed her eyes in preparation for the explosion that was sure to come.


	42. Squalo 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sorry I can't seem to get past this point but I do kind of want to take a chance to 'check in' with other characters  
> ...I promise the next chapter will be what happens next and I will probably make it a different character

Squalo had followed Xanxus from the ballroom when he had decided to follow after the Tenth and his sidekicks, who followed after the former babies, who chased after their uninvited guests. The whole thing was a larger spectacle than it needed to be—Xanxus, or anyone else in the Varia, would have been willing to kill the intruders on the spot—but the Tenth was too soft and would probably cry if they killed someone ‘frivolously’ or ‘before they were a threat’ or some other stupid notion.

Squalo stood by his opinion that the kid was to soft and weak to be in charge of a mafia family and his Boss would be the better choice any day.

Just like he also hoped that the weak-ass kid realized that they weren’t following him as some kind of fucked up protection squad, but because they really really wanted a chance to try to take these people apart—they gave off an aura of strength and smelt like blood, some stronger than others.

Still, he didn’t know what the hell these fucking people were thinking when they decided to crash the party—he WOULD have understood if they had crashed the party for a fight (who doesn’t love a good fight?) but they didn’t seem too interested in engaging them in battle. Honestly, they were probably crazier than the brats considering that the five of them never seemed at all worried, despite their small number and the strength of the Vongola.

‘Sides, who crashed a fucking Vongola party with such a lame-ass excuse. Fuckers didn’t even make sense half the time they spoke (which was honestly one of the reasons Squalo wasn’t paying much attention to them). He had pretty much zoned out after the first few sentences and was now just watching Boss to see if he would be given some sign that he could attack; he didn’t have to listen to the shit they were spewing in order to know when he was able to attack.

He really wanted to fight, and all he had to do was stay out of Boss’s and Reborn’s way. The brats still didn’t seem to enjoy tearing an enemy apart like they should—heathens—and all of the other former babies would probably not mind letting him choose his enemy first (and if they really had a problem, well, he had been looking for a chance to see how he measured up), but Boss was Boss and so got to do as he liked, and Reborn was crazy and Squalo was fairly sure he was immortal as well sometimes.

Levi-A-Than and Lussaria had been the only members of the Varia that had followed him followed them (Mammon had come but as a former baby and not a member of the Varia), and he was mostly thankful for that so he didn’t have to deal with that fucking bratty prince. Though, if he was right, the brat might be wishing the prince had come with them because he could not see him passing up this chance to create chaos, and—with a quick glance around—he noticed that the cloud brat had slipped away at some point.

The Vongola was going to be in complete chaos when they got back, but, if they were lucky, maybe the building will still be standing and there won’t be too many dead. That’s what the brat gets though for taking off his first few hours as boss of the family. His fucking tutor should have taught him better and he’ll probably be given extra hours of ‘training’ in order to make up for his mistake. Seriously though, these brats were irresponsible if they thought leaving after being handed the family was a good idea. His hyper intuition might be good in the moment but it obviously isn’t great for his future health.

And then he kind of wished he’d listened to at least some of what was being said because he caught Xanxus raising an eyebrow in interest, Mammon freezing up for a second, Levi tripping over his own feet while standing still and face-planting in the dirt, and Lal—who managed to put up with the Sawada jackass without having killed him yet, which means she must have nerves of absolute steel—blink in utter incomprehension as her jaw dropped open in shock.

“No way she’s that useless purple guy?!” the Storm-brat shouted, flailing around.

Purple who?

The only person that even kind of made him think of was the former cloud baby, Skull, but he wasn’t actually that useless. They did know that, right? It was an open secret in the Varia, something that was never talked about but everyone somehow knew.

Belphegor had come at him with his knives once—it was right after he had been taken in by the Varia—one a day where Squalo was, unfortunately, in charge of him and he had instinctively stopped the attack and treated it like it was normal for a kid of eight to trying to kill you with bloodlust in his eyes. In fact, he had looked disturbingly fond of the prince for a second before it was hidden again. Squalo might have thought he was imagining it if it wasn’t for the fact that he was Varia quality.

During a random run-in on Mafia Island during an attack Squalo had seen him pick up a sword before seemingly shaking off whatever he was thinking and putting it down. He held a sword like he had trained for it his entire life and Squalo had seen that mastery in his grip.

There were a number of incidents and just a feeling of danger that clung to him that stopped the Varia from viewing him as weak, but none of them saw any reason to poke at his façade.

He glanced at Xanxus—he’d met up with the cloud a number of times but never said much about it—and saw that he didn’t seem to care much about whatever the others were going on about (so he clearly didn’t miss anything too important), though he did look like he was about a second away from jumping out and starting a fight on his own, since it seemed like they would never get to it without some kind of intervention.

And then Reborn was in the clearing, followed by Fon (seemingly a bit more reluctant but Squalo didn’t know why that might be), and smiled with too many teeth to be nice as he prepared for a fight as he finally started to listen now that there seemed to be a promise of bloodshed.


	43. AU Arrival

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this is pretty much a "I had some free time to type out an idea but not enough time to update something because that involves remembering what had been written before" story.
> 
> Honestly, I wouldn't expect too much of me for the rest of the year. I have TPAs for the credential program, applying for jobs, planning (and then going on) a Europe vacation, hopefully starting my new teaching job (fingers crossed), Aftershock in October to wrap up the year (something I really really want to go to), and whatever else manages to pop up on my schedule. So maybe a Christmas update if I can swing it.
> 
> If I have any free time I will try (I might have a week or two in June) to update but, seriously, no promises. 
> 
> Now, onto the clip...(WARNING not proof read and I was falling asleep as I wrote it. Seriously I haven't even read over it, just typed.)

Tobirama Senju had finally gone back to being Tobirama. She let her mask fall and the personality of Skull was discarded in order to become as close to her original self as was possible. She couldn't be who she was completely any more for a number of reasons. One was that things changed and she too changed; she had grown and her lacking connections in this world had aged her. Another reason was that she was directionless in a way that the old her had never been and probably couldn't have survived. 

Unrecognized, she stood with her arms crossed leaning against a coffee shop in a small town in Italy that was popular for mafia members. She felt the approaching person but said nothing and waited instead.

An envelope was dropped on top of her crossed arms as the red eyes she turned to meet were lit with a dangerous kind of amusement. "Why don't you kill someone, it will make you feel better."

The envelope was eyed pointedly, but he said nothing else before continuing to walk past her.

Tobirama smirked. "And what if killing one person doesn't help?" She asked lightly before he moved from range.

"Well, we've got a whole list. Stop by sometime."

"I might."

\----

 

It hadn't even been a week since the curse was broken when the archeblano were attacked. They were all below their skill level, but because of the quick change in their bodies and their flames readjusting to the loss of the pacifiers the battled been much harder than it should have been and most of them had ended up with injuries. The least injured one was the one that was least sespected to have survived any battle the others considered hard. 

That had only a few weeks rest, and Reborn specifically was still uniquely irritated about their situation, though it had improved since t a higher level of control had been received.

Sadly no one gets to rest when connected to the Vongola. The Vongola nerds (you know who you are) had been talking to Byakuran about alternate universes and places that even he couldn't see, and together decided that they would make a kind of window in order to see through to the other side. Instead they made a door. The door wasn't to a different room either, it did manage to reach through to another house like they promised but was a door that they had cracked open. The door had opened completely seemingly in the middle of an argument between two men. One man had wild and spiking long black hair. The one with the bird nest hair had also been the first to react. He called outa few indecipherable words and reached for a weapon. The other man, the lone with long straight brown hair, had immediately tried to clam down the screaming  ban before he seemed to freeze a little out of nowhere.

And then he took off and the black haired man followed, seemingly angrier as he had a kind of aura of destruction and their point and his red eyes looked like dragon fire. 

Tsuna's intuition gave him to very clear warnings. The first was not to get into their way and Tsuna wasn't planning to do that anyway. The second was a siren in his head letting him know that they would be heading to the archeblano's house and that they should probably be warned. (He wasn't sure if that was his intuition or his forever-present fear of Reborn and punishments should be make an incorrect choice talking.)

Reborn listened to Tsuna give a brief explanation once he answered the phone for his cowardly student. Then, he want outside to await their guests. One had been shot a text message and therefore notified-he also decided to appear behind reborn a moment after he received his warning. Viper (Mammon) had vanished from wherever they had been, but Reborn could feel just enough flames from the hidden mist that he knew they were ready. Colnello took a roof-top position with his sniper rifle. Lal was still helping out at the CEDEF building, Verde was in his basement lab and no one wanted to see if they could both give him the warning and escape without being a subject to experiment on, Yuni was both too young to inform and separate enough from them that her presences wasn't required immediately. No one thought to inform Skull who was still labeled a civilian even so many years later and therefore useless.

 

 

The two men got to the archeblano house at the same time that Skull did. Skull barely had time to put the motorcycle she was riding on away with her helmet before she was attacked. 

There was a loud piercing screech, the only warning, before the dark haired one threw himself, weapon first, at Skull...Who dodged expertly.

Before Reborn could shoot Skull (or help her-maybe) Skull had responded herself. She was slipping past his attack and invading his space for a counter attack before anyone had realized exactly what had happened. Skull was giving as good as she got.

"You Red-Eyed demon! Ghost! Hellspawn!" the man wailed.

"Uchiha," Skull responded with a soft and yet flinty voice, "I see your manners haven't improved. I would have hoped you would be housebroken by now."

"The hell! I don't want to hear that kind of crap from you, you bastard!"

"Do you even know where you are? Before taking account of your surroundings you rush in to attack," Skull sounded both condescending and judgmental, "I see."

The black-haired man, Uchiha according to Skull, let out a loud howl before attacking Skull with more vigor and power.

"Tobirama!" The brown-haired man cried out of nowhere, causing both fighters to falter, before tearfully throwing himself into Skull's arms and wrapping his limbs around Skull before he could be pulled away.

"Hashirama," Skull sighed exasperated, "Please do control yourself."

"But Tobi," the main whimpered, "Don't you miss me too!"

Skull raised an eyebrow containing more scorn than any who had thought they knew him had believed possible for him. Skull wasn't the one to speak though, the one named Uchiha was. "Hashirama, that re-eyed bastard was in your office yelling at you just a few minutes ago."

"And now that the Uchiha is calmer," Skull said as she forced Hashirama to release her as she knocked him on to the ground to do so, "maybe we can talk about how it is that you arrived."

From his spot on the ground Hashirama's eyes got wide as he took a place around, "Right. I  actually don't know. Where are we anyway?" 

Barely refraining from rolling her eyes she looked to Uchiha who sneered at her. "I assumed this was your doing."

"It was not." She said at the same time that the 10th generation and the Varia arrived.

"Lackey," Reborn growled, "What is going on!?!"

"Lackey?" Hashirama asked with a confused little tilt of his head, looking a little like a puppy, "Tobi, why do you look like that anyway?"

"There was an incident. We did not arrive in the same way, nor, I think, from the same time for sure." 

\--------

 

Fon looked at Skull the first time and tired not to laugh. He managed but barely.

The second glance at Skull made him miss his best friend more than he ever thought that he would.

And the third glance that evening made him regret.

There was no fourth glance that day, and so they met for the second time in their lives without saying a word.

 

By their fifth meeting as a group Fon was convinced that he was the only one to remember anything at all.

Skull, Tobirama- really, even with her new hair and makeup she wasn't hard to notice, did not react to her presence until it had gone.

 

Then the curse happened and no one really wanted to speak of anything from the past.

But time travel was apparently a thing here.

When Fon woke with his new memories and he could think about was  ~~Skull's~~ Tobirama's back as she said:

"Sorry Uchiha, it's about time I made it up to you anyway."

So many enemies fell, but so did that damn Senju and he wasn't sure it was worth it.

He didn't like this knew feeling.

 

The last time Fon looked at Skull he really hoped that they would get to rest this time.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't abandoned 'The Helping Hand', at least not permanently, but I have been really busy. I am student teaching and hope to be done with the credential program in a year. I can really only write things that I don't have a plan for, and really short chapters at that.


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